ENG-ITA

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Digital Pareidolia: A Personal Index Of Facebook’s Erroneous Portraits, 2012-2013. Archival inkjet prints. 3 elements. X:180cm; Y:90 overall

In four months, I uploaded all the photos from my personal archive to my Facebook profile: 30,000 files acquired since 2005. This is the equivalent, on global average, to the number of photos uploaded to Facebook every 10 seconds. I then went through each of Facebook’s suggested face recognitions, looking for possible errors occurring during the use of the technology. Facebook recognized the face of a person where one did not exist 193 times (meaning that on global average, this facial recognition technology makes an error 19 times every second). It seems as though Facebook is not immune to the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia: the obsessive recognition of human faces in everyday objects which seems to be genetically linked to the survival of the species in threatening situations. Instead of a face, something seemingly random and trivial is highlighted by the technology such as a piece of fabric, a hand, a rock or a plant. At the end, I analyzed and organized all the errors into a coherent system. 

During the operation of uploading photos, Facebook uses facial recognition technology to prompt the user for the names of the people in the pictures, creating a database that connects images and personal data. The same technology is used in video surveillance in order to automatically link the image of a face to the identity of an individual (through the use of biometric data). Together, facial recognition technologies, social networks and computer databases create a digital persona for each individual, which often escapes the control and knowledge of the real individual, and whose influence is not solely limited to a virtual existence.

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EXHIBITIONS

• The Projects, BEEP BOOP BOP, (2014) curated by Leah Brown and Peter Symons, FATVillage art district, Fort Lauderdale FL, US
• EYEBEAM, PRISM Break Up, (2013) curated by Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Ramsey Nasser and Open Culture, NYC, US
• Mediterranea16 – Young Artists Biennial (BJCEM), Errors Allowed, (2013) curated by Charlotte Bank, Alessandro Castiglioni, Nadira Laggoune, Delphine Leccas, Slobodne Veze / Loose Associations, Marco  Trulli and Claudio Zecchi, Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona, Italy

Presented at:

• Technological Error, Power and Metamorphosis, ART TALKS at SIGGRAPH 2014, moderated by Basak Senova, Vancouver Convention Center, Canada

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(SELECTED) BIBLIOGRAPHY