News/Research

Trevor Paglen & Kate Crawford’s Making Faces

27 Feb, 2020

Trevor Paglen & Kate Crawford’s Making Faces

The two-day cultural event by Prada took over famed Belle Epoque restaurant Maxim’s, where the brand held an intimate dinner on Sunday evening.

This event of Prada Mode utilizes the installation of "Making Faces", which takes a critical look at current surveillance and policing systems, tracing back to the 19th century when mug shots were used to help detect potential offenders. One of the tools featured is Imagenet Roulette, a facial recognition software that classifies faces depending on the information scanned by the camera.

An excerpt below:

“There are only so many papers you can write, and these will only ever reach a niche audience,” she said. “What we have to do in this new decade is to create a much bigger public conversation about the politics of technology — specifically who gets harmed, who is at risk, and who are the people who will benefit from it — and really make sure we are making a choice. At the moment, things are done in secret: suddenly you have to use facial recognition to get on the plane at an airport. These are not happening as democratic conversations, but as top-down, highly concentrated decisions made by powerful entities.”

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