It’s called the fusiform gyrus, the area of the brain devoted entirely to recognising faces, and until about 50 years ago it was the best tool we had for the task. Then, in the late 1960s, employees of an unnamed intelligence agency developed software that could do the job even better, and now we have phone cameras that can find and focus on our faces, social networking sites that can discern which of our friends to tag, and retailers who are using our faces to track us, regardless of whether we’re shoplifters or high spenders, when we enter their stores. Face Swap Live has moved us a step closer to living as augmented reality avatars, everyone from the DMV to MasterCard to Chinese “financial supermarket” Rong360 is using it to ID users, and Google is working on a new payment app called Hands Free that let’s you pay with your eyes, nose and mouth.
In your face, fingerprints.
The power of the technology and its applications are growing exponentially, prompting questions about just how much biometric data we should trade off for a little more convenience, if, indeed, we have a say in the matter.
Artist, novelist and culture prophet Douglas Coupland collaborated with art portal Artsy and interactive designers Foxholes to exhibit the work “Deep Face: Communicate with your future self” at The Armory Show from March 2-6. Audiences had their images snapped before an algorithm ‘de-recognised’ them by concealing their faces behind an abstract pop-art GIF.
The title of the work references Facebook’s Deep Face recognition project, which has a 97 percent success rate, 12 percent better than the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system. The Facebook project in turn alludes to Deep Blue, IBM’s computer that famously defeated chess master Garry Kasparov.
We spoke to Coupland about the work, the needs for both recognition and anonymity and how the internet is rewiring (what’s left of) our brains.
It seems implicit in “Deep Face” that we are competing with technology, and that we need a defence against it.
Yes, and for the moment I’d start with people recognising that this is out there. It’s nearly perfect and will soon be perfected.
Could the sort of software you created to combat facial recognition become as ubiquitous as web ad blockers?
As ubiquitous as anything else.
How pessimistic are you about abuses of identity recognition and the future of social sharing?
It could go very wrong, but then Okay Go! could make a really good facial recognition video, so that would be an upside. I do think that counter-software will be something along the line of captchas for the body. The pieces in the show are meditations on how little information systems will need to recognise you in, say, 2036. Just a fraction of an ear will probably be enough. Or ratios of one portion of your skull to your jawline.
Even after massive data leaks (Snowden, Jennifer Lawrence sex pics, etc) If anything we seem to be only giving away more of ourselves, including, for instance, our fingerprints so we can access our iPhones a fraction of a second faster.
One way of looking at this is: who would you rather have performing these functions — the government? Yikes! Religions? Double yikes. When you think about it, there’s really no other way for this stuff to happen.
And yet selfies (and the asses in them) are becoming less accurate but more abundant. You’re a famous artist. Is anonymity an ambition or a failure? How should we handle this tension?
I don’t think there is a way, and the realisation of this is what adds a weird tinge of horror to the texture of everyday life. It’s the angst I discuss in my ongoing slogan project and in the book the Age of Earthquakes.
As part of your collaboration with Artsy at Armory, seven of your “Slogans for the 21st Century” appear on the fair’s tote bags. While some are new (“Someone always has a better VIP card than you”), is it weird or totally predictable that works about the future would have to wait four or five years after you created them to be everywhere?
Definitely weird… especially when you see them in Manhattan stripped of their Armory context. Predictable? I don’t know… I do a lot of things but not everything has legs, and I never know what’s going to take root and what doesn’t. I have all this work I’ve done which I love but nobody else does. I wish it was out in the world working, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Ultimately, whatever I do has to come from something felt inside me, and is possibly too personal to travel.
The tote I was given for the fair is “I miss my pre-internet brain.” Do you think there are lasting differences between people who grew up pre-internet and those who didn’t? What would they be?
That’s probably the best known slogan of all the slogans. Five years ago when I did it, people honestly tried to tell me that our brains were the same as ever and that I was wrong. Nobody does that any more. Me, I’m genuinely starting to forget what my pre-internet brain felt like. As for changes in generations, that’s too huge a question to answer here. It’s massive.
Sometimes we think about technology as having generated starker divisions between generations — Mum’s taking photos with her iPad again — but there’s also a sense in which tech seems to be collapsing generational divides.
Yes.
Partly that’s enabling communities to form around niche interests that span age groups, but also just homogenising existence in a big way — you don’t need to know any kids to know what the kids are listening to. Do you think distinct generations are coming more quickly or slowly? Twenty-five years after your novel Generation X, are they a more or less useful way to understand people than they were in 1991?
As far as I can see, the tendency to decimalise generations continues as robustly as ever… the millennial thing in particular. What’s funny is that they say the exact same things about millennials as they did about Gen X. It’s like a story they take out of the cupboards, dust off, rename, and then put out into the world again.
Douglas Coupland was recently artist in residence at the Google Cultural Institute, Paris. He writes a fortnightly column for the FT.
Image sources: Foxtales and Daniel Faria Gallery
This article was originally posted on Flamingo’s online magazine Lens