Conceal/ment is the result of a two-month long speculative exercise: I wanted to see if there was a way of approaching facial recognition technology as though it were possible for such technology to obliterate — rather than identify and systematize — one’s face.  

   My process entailed running portraits of my friends through facial recognition systems. After realizing how immediate the systems detected, and identified, the faces of my friends, I sought to create a project that could imagine that such “identification” could be reappropriated to make those faces impossible, imperceptible, and unidentifiable.

 Using an algorithm that superimposes a randomized number of clear, geometric blocks onto their faces, I produced a series of images wherein my friends’ faces appear disfigured and imperceptible – both to the human eye, and to facial recognition technologies.

 This algorithm, if applied to facial recognition systems, would reverse the process of identification towards disfiguration, thus reappropriating a system of surveillance towards oppositional means.