Post 3: Mask Making & Politics
After all the lectures where finished I was a bit uncertain about how everything the lecturers had talked about would connect to my project. I had chosen mask making for performance as my course of choice and was not really sure about how this could apply to the different themes and perspectives of Better Lives. However, as soon as my mask making project started, I started getting a lot of ideas and I everything I had learned the previous weeks became more evident since it was being applied to a real-life project and not just ideas.
The mask making project asked us to create a mask that could connect to a political movement or idea and gave us numerous examples of this. I wanted to make something current and contemporary and thought about different political situations around the world. The one idea that stuck with me came from a news story I had seen on tv a couple of weeks earlier. It discussed the new facial recognition technology that is being used in parts of China and how it could instantly recognize and identify a person from a crowd.
The examples brought up included using the technology to spot J walkers crossing the road and showing their face on a billboard to shame them and to find wanted people. It also showed workplaces that used this technology to scan employees faces when they walked in the front door to register their exact time of arrival and keep a close eye on who was late. Most of the world outside of China do not use technology like this yet and many have spoken out against it, claiming it is a huge threat to personal integrity. There are arguments both against and for using facial recognition in public places and recently it has been discussed to imply it in London. Personally, I am quite skeptical towards it. Sure, it could make the police work faster and smarter to catch dangerous criminals and to locate missing people easier, but where is the line drawn? How much can we trust the people using the technology to only use it for good. A camera recording where you are at what time is valuable information for Data collecting companies that could make huge profits with this information and looking at the development of data collecting in the last decade, I have my doubts that this would be any different.
Since this debate was interesting to me, I wanted to create a mask for resisting this type of technology. Doing research on this topic, I found a pattern that could supposedly disrupt this technology by confusing it. I wanted to use this pattern to create a stylish mask accessory to be used in protest against facial recognition being used in public places and registering people without their consent.