INTERGAZE
2021
Installation
Physical_Computing
Facial_Recognition(P5.js)
Machine_Learning
Intergaze reflects upon face pareidolia and anthropomorphism on humans and machines, showing that facial recognition technology is not truly new, but simply extension of human tendency. Glitches, live code, and the complex mathematics behind facial recognition machine learning presents the current state of the human obsession with anthropomorphizing other entities and seeing ourselves everywhere we go. It is time to reflect on the border of human vision and machine vision, and our relations to technologies.
We never look at just one thing, we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves, as John Berger said, to look is an act of choice, as a result of the act, what we see is brought within our reach (1972, pp. 8-9). By seeing and interacting with the installation, audiences were situated in the relation between their vision and the vision of machine. As a part of the visible world, when we looked at the enlarged plug socket model, the model also looked back to us. The model was just a symbol while the machine running the code and following its rules of decision making behind the wooden box and the projection was the thing that really processed us as pieces of visual information which generated by its “eyes” – the webcam camera, and finally produced the hybrid pareidolia faces under the vision of machines.
The vision of machines is generated when you look at or interact with them. We have built a system to mimic the ability of humans at the very beginning and keeping improving it to have a better vision of physical world than us do. This way of seeing bleed through into our life, into all our other ways of seeing and interacting with everything else. Bringing in some other intelligence, such as machine intelligence, it might change the very nature of the game we are playing. The whole project was not just about face pareidolia, but also reflected on the results of bringing new technology into our life. Lots of things need to be rediscussed, because there is no such a simple vision but a hybrid vision of all entities when we are seeing and interacting with each other.
