Power Portraits

For this piece, a series of publicity photographs of board members of major tech companies were passed through Google’s Cloud Vision facial detection platform, and the resulting facial landmark datasets were printed as a set of posters. The face landmarks are represented as small circles and the outline boundary of the detected face is shown as a rectangle. Each face is shown at a similar scale and the faces are represented in an abstracted way, allowing visual comparison between them. In this work, the actual faces of the people who make decisions about the governance of companies that develop invasive or compulsive technologies had one of these technologies turned on their own likenesses. This challenges the assumption that board members of tech companies are themselves invisible and inscrutable, appearing only through their mediated image and through the products they are responsible for managing.

Exhibited at:

TALKEX17, Rotherham ROAR, Rotherham, 3rd–7th April 2017
ICCV Computer Vision Art Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, 2019 (Shortlisted)