Spotted in Westworld, S3, EP7 : mask to beat facial detection
Westworl Season 3, episode 7 (© HBO)
As Westworld finale is airing tomorrow, let’s have a look at the fashion tech accessories of this season 3, the last one of episode 7 being Caleb Nichols’s identity concealing mask, a growing preocupation, amongst artists and fashion designers, in our digital age.
By Ludmilla Intravaia
When your job is to catch people for an evil organisation, without drawing attention to you, you may be looking for ways to defeat facial and mouvement detection cameras, while you do your dirty work. For Caleb Nichols (played by American actor Aaron Paul), a face mask with multiple eyes print will efficently do the trick, by altering the expected face features targeted by algorithms.
This Westworld season 3 was full of fashion tech accessories (discover all of them here). And watch the trailer of this May 3 finale below.
Creating makeup and garments that are helping hidding the identity of the wearer is a growing preocupation, amongst artists and fashion designers. For instance, eager to confront the issues of anonymity in the digital age. where facial recognition softwares can capture your image at any time, the American researcher and artist based in Berlin Adam Harvey, whose work is focused on computer vision, privacy and surveillance, came up in 2014 with the project CV Dazzle (see here), consisting of makeup and hair styling camouflage from face recognition.
© Adam Harvey
More recently, in February 27, 2020, the makeup of Atlein Fall-Winter 20 show, in Paris, was inspired by Grigory Bakunov’s work, as explained on the brand Instagram account : “Bakunov, a top specialist at one of Russia's largest tech companies, has invented an anti-facial recognition algorithm to conceal people's identities with the help of makeup”.
A trend that is not about to die out, far from it, in the current context of digital tracking of the population for health reasons, linked to the Coronavirus pandemic or crowd control, during street demonstrations.
* Continue reading on Le Boudoir Numérique with these following papers :
- Fashion tech in Altered Carbon
- Another Life : (Fashion tech) party in space