Year
2021
Tag
Installations
A visitor steps into view and sees their own face on a monitor. A coloured box locates it. Text appears beside the image. The speed of the response gives little time to separate recognition from judgement: the system has found a face, and already seems to have something to say about its owner.
Data Violence staged this encounter inside an arrangement of surveillance-camera housings. A working webcam supplied the image; five camera shells surrounded the display. The apparatus made the act of looking conspicuous while the basis of the judgement remained out of view.
Interactive installation · 730 Hours of Violence · Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona.
Screen close-up · Barcelona, 2021 · Half-speed playback to follow the changing detection boxes. Silent archive footage.
The person inside the box
We used the familiar visual language of automated recognition to bring visitors into a process they usually encounter at a distance. On the screen, a moving person became an outlined face and a set of categories. The classifications were deliberately arbitrary. They were part of the installation’s proposition, not an assessment of the person standing before it.
The gap between these two kinds of information was central. Locating a face in an image does not establish the truth of a judgement about that person. An interface can nevertheless present them together, with the same typography, the same immediacy and the same apparent certainty.
When a judgement looks like a measurement
In Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil examines models whose authority can conceal their assumptions and whose consequences are difficult for affected people to contest. A mathematical result still depends on decisions: what is counted, which examples are available, what outcome is rewarded, and which errors are accepted.
The exhibition research placed this argument beside documented cases in recruitment and airport screening. A recruitment tool trained on historical patterns can carry those patterns into its recommendations. A screening procedure built around limited categories can expose people who do not fit them to additional scrutiny. These are different systems, with different mechanisms; their shared concern is what follows when an imposed classification governs a person’s treatment.
What is missing from the display
The display also leaves out much of the labour that makes automated systems possible. Miriam Cherry’s writing on virtual work brings attention to people whose tasks can disappear behind a digital service. Data are collected and labelled, rules are chosen, systems are maintained. A result arriving instantly does not mean that it arrived without human decisions.
In the gallery, the consequences stopped at the screen. Visitors could watch themselves being described and leave the apparatus behind. The work held that limited encounter against situations where a category follows a person into an application, a checkpoint or a decision they cannot easily appeal.
The apparatus behind the judgement
A working webcam supplied the visitor image to a computer and screen. Five security-camera housings surrounded the display, giving the installation the visual authority of a surveillance system. The technical documentation distinguishes these housings from the webcam that captured the image.
Assembly study · An explanatory reconstruction from the exhibition archive. Components are separated for clarity; proportions are illustrative.
Materials & components
- Webcam, computer and display
- Five security-camera housings
- Display mount and signal/power connections
Selected references
- Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (2016).
- Lucas Waldron and collaborators, reporting on transgender travellers and airport scanners, ProPublica (2019).
- Jeffrey Dastin / Reuters, Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women (2018).
- Miriam Cherry, Working for (Virtually) Minimum Wage (2009).
- Further viewing: Coded Bias (linked from the original exhibition page).
Part of 730 Hours of Violence, an exhibition by Domestic Data Streamers at Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona, 7–30 September 2021.
This project received funding through the MediaFutures project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 951962. The work reflects the authors’ views; the European Commission is not responsible for any use of the information.
