Dana X On View Gallery
Every four years America has a chance to start anew. I only mean that in theory and if I’m pushed, I really don’t mean that at all. It seems if candidates don’t lead with fear, they flip the coin and lead with hope. Fear, hope, fear, hope, fear, hope...and now social media amplifies it all and through its own algorithms, supports biases every individual has.
When the internet began it did the unthinkable, it gave humans a new final frontier. We were able to create a world out of imaginary space, ethernet cable and thoughts. And those thoughts lived and breathed anew and beyond to the tiniest corners of the discovered world. For a moment, as with all new discoveries, hope abounded because the best of humanity was present with the greatest of intentions. However this new frontier seems to have flipped the coin or perhaps the coin has slipped from our fingers. People are more depressed than ever, teenagers more suicidal than ever, humans more narcissistic than ever and not surprisingly, politics are being more influenced than ever.
How did the Information Age become the Misinformation age, bringing us potentially closer to civil war than in any other recent time? Well, as they say, the relationship is complicated and not to be adequately tackled in a three paragraph intro. However Dana Potter understands more than most of us can make an educated guess at. We sat down at our respective computers for a socially distanced Q&A, in which we discussed digital culture, social media and facial recognition programs. Below are her answers and some excellent links to deepen ones understanding of this brave new world we live in.
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Q.) Your art is steeped in science. How did that relationship come about?
A.) Those who are drawn to both science and art know the practices are very similar. Both begin from curiosity and thrive through trial and error. I first became interested in digital technologies when I took a class in computer programming and found I had a knack for it. I stuck with the subjects of digital culture, social media, biometric technologies in my artwork because they intersect between body, economics, and psychology which all fascinate me.
Q.) You seem to expose the things humans take for granted on a daily basis and magically turn them into art. Selfies or daily computer use morphs into a closer look at facial mapping and colorful mouse patterns. What piques your thought process to focus in on a certain intellectual angle for a series?
A.) I learned about digital tools not just from the perspective of how to use them, but with a critical awareness of the capitalist and surveillance interests which built our phones, fund our social media platforms, and push for smart devices in our homes. The issue of surveillance capitalism is massive, and you cannot communicate the seriousness of a systemic problem without giving people tangibility, without telling people stories they can easily understand. As an artist I think I am still working on this skill of finding the right angle or story to talk about. I usually pick a topic such as eye-tracking or facial recognition when I have access to the tool myself or it is a major issue in the news.
Q.) What have been your discoveries about facial recognition in general?
A.) Surprisingly, I learned that Charles Darwin spent three decades categorizing facial expressions. He took hundreds of photos of people with faces contorted by metal pulleys and tried to create a system to accurately identify emotion. The photos from his experiment and many modern facial recognition textbooks have a violence in them of which the authors seem oblivious or content with. I am also increasingly upset at how easy it is to get access to facial recognition datasets and programs online for free or at a low cost. Outside of my work I highly recommend anyone who cares about this issue to follow the work of an organization called Fight for the Future. They have done amazing work to identify how and where facial recognition is being used and what laws prevent it's use. I strongly advice against Amazon's Ring service as they sell data collected from home cameras to law enforcement. https://www.banfacialrecognition.com/map/
Q.) Have there been any advantages or disadvantages you have found in relation to certain segments of the population and facial recognition?
A.) Up until the past few years the datasets used to train facial recognition technologies (especially in the US) were biased because they were over-representative of white males and led to less accurate identifications of women but especially people of color. With companies like ClearView AI (who in January of 2020 began selling it's facial recognition tools to law enforcement and private surveillance companies) scraping images off of social media, including Facebook and Youtube, the datasets are getting larger and the programs more accurate. Some might argue that having accurate facial recognition would be an unbiased tool in criminal cases, I would strongly disagree. An accurate facial recognition tool could be an even more dangerous weapon against minorities and people of color because they are more likely to be stopped by police and more likely to have a case brought against them. In China in 2019, accurate facial recognition was used to arrest and hold captive the Uighur population, a minority Muslim group. We cannot put faith in technology solve systemic racism, it is technology that can quickly become the weapon of the racist.
Q.) What’s on the horizon for you artistically? Next project or series?
A.) I recently started teaching at the University of Northern Iowa in Interactive Digital Studies so I'm reaching out across the university to collaborate. I have hopes to work with music, computer programming, and professors and staff in kinesthesiology. I can't say specifically what I will do but I have hopes for more body tracking or eye-tracking projects. Next semester with my students we will be working with projections for installations which I'm greatly looking forward to.