Mamas & Papas (2022 - 2023)

 

With fearful fascination and a creeping under-skinned worry I’ve been observing the current development of face recognition functions. Nowadays the function has become available not only for the surveillance entities, but also for businesses and literally… anybody. Our faces are being tracked online especially due to our presence on social media. I’m exploring the idea of fooling the algorithms. To what extent do we need to change our facial features to fool the system? Will the softwares create our false visual digital identities? Or will it recognise the falsification? In ‘Mamas & Papas’ I create multiple identities. My face is a canvas on which eyes and mouths are borrowed from other people.

 

How many details need to be altered or exchanged to actually not only fool the face recognition algorithms but also our brains? Can we really be fooled? When I showed the images to my 3 year old daughter and asked her who is on the picture, her answer was always the same: ‘Mama’.