Reversed Surveillance

Marcel Top

20 sep – 30 oct 2024
B-Lounge da U.Minho — Campus de Gualtar

  • Exhibitions
  • Opening Weekend
  • Discovery 2024
  • Braga

Curator: Vítor Nieves

Reversed Surveillance

In January 2023, the French government passed a bill which legalises Algorithmic Video Surveillance (AVS) as a crowd controlling measure for all gatherings of more than 300 people. This technology is put in place to automate the process of detecting crime.

In Reversed Surveillance Marcel Top looks at two strains of AVS, Emotion Recognition and Movement Analysis. By putting these two to test, Top challenges their objectivity by pushing their detecting boundaries and highlighting their flaws as empirical structures.

Addressing the clash between human and non-human, the artist ultimately questions the efficiency, righteousness and possible futures deriving from letting these non-human technologies act as absolute judges in human-reading matters related to the right of assembly in France.

Emotion recognition is similar to facial recognition, but instead of focusing on identity recognition, its aim is to decode the person’s inner emotional state. In this case, the artificial intelligence is trained to detect, analyse and decode human behavioural patterns associated with emotions.

Starting from a 3 hour long livestream of a recent French protest, the artist uses the software ‘Video Content Analysis’ to analyse the crowd and discern over 30 000 people’s faces.

With the use of an AI trained to recognise 7 facial expressions associated with determined emotions the artist categorises the protestors based on the emotional state they were assigned by the artificial intelligence. This process allows him to visualise how the AI interprets a protest.

There is currently no record of emotion recognition being used in decisions affecting protestors. However, this technology has been widely used by companies to monitor their employees.

The continuously evolving nature of surveillance technologies, combined with the normalisation derived by the ease with which these technologies are introduced on a legislative level, poses a threat to the right of assembly, protest, and speech. This becomes extremely threatening when the technology is given the task to decode something of human nature, and used to make decisions based on probability rather than events.

In the end Top creates a facial recognition tool to identify police officers during protests. By harnessing the power of surveillance technologies Top tries to create new tools to expose the danger of these technologies as well as to use it to our own advantage.

B-Lounge da U.Minho — Campus de Gualtar
Universidade do Minho — Campus de Gualtar
Variante de Gualtar, 4710-057 Braga

Opening Hours:

Monday – Friday
08:30–20:00

Saturday and Sunday
Closed