Is Counter-Surveillance the Future of Fashion?

When I first heard about the Amazon Echo, I thought why in the world would anyone need this? Then the conspiracy theorist side of me quickly followed with the thought that its purpose is government surveillance.

Now months after its release and in light of a new WikiLeaks scandal it seems I am not the only one who is suspicious of this new technology. Videos have gone viral asking Echo’s voice Alexa if she works for the C.I.A., with no response. This begs the question of whether other apps are used for surveillance. Is Snapchat used purely for face mapping its users to collect images for facial recognition? Is Facebook tracking our every move?

In a post 9/11 world, our society has differing emotions between privacy and security that are Kafkaesque. Each of our lives is under constant surveillance with websites, social media, and retailers collecting our personal data to NSA surveillance of citizens, and even domestic drone use. We seem eerily close to an Orwellian reality. The government has no right to surveil innocent people, especially its own citizens. Not even Franz Kafka, whose novel The Trial anticipated our modern surveillance society, could have predicted that fashion would be the holy grail of anti-surveillance.

Source: Adam Harvey (ahprojects.com)

However, we see Berlin-based artist Adam Harvey entering the scene with his project Hyperface in conjunction with Hyphen-Labs, which creates textiles for clothing that can overwhelm computer systems that search using facial recognition. The prints loosely resemble faces that will provide the computer system with thousands of false hits, thus hiding the real identity of the wearer. In a previous project titled “CV Dazzle,” Harvey invented a style that would block facial recognition through the use of florescent makeup and hairstyling that hung over the face. This led to his innovative idea to modify the foreground of what appears around us.

Source: cvdazzle.com

At the Sundance Film Festival, Carmen Aguilar y Wedge of Hyphen-Labs unveiled their new scarf that is meant to disguise the wearer. The textile has 1,200 pixelated faces intended to deceive computer algorithms. A few of their pieces, including their incandescent ScatterViz visor, deflects light which makes the wearer’s face undetectable to cameras. Similar technology was displayed in an episode of Hawaii 5-0 where bank robbers wore modified clothing that had LED lights sewn into the collar. The lights emit heat which refracts causing their face to not be revealed on camera.

Harvey now has a full line of what he calls stealth wear including anti-drone burkas and hijabs. There is no pricing in place yet, but it is expected to be expensive since the clothing is made using real silver. While Harvey says a Mylar blanket could serve the same purpose, it isn’t quite as fashionable as his designs.

HyperFace saliency map. Scarf rendering by Ece Tankal / hyphen-labs.com. 2017

This idea will be popular as facial recognition is on the rise, and many varieties of commercial face reading closed circuit television cameras are becoming easily accessible for personal home use. This line takes aim at those both fashion-forward and perhaps paranoid. While many will argue that our own security is more important than privacy, nothing is going to stop true criminals from doing what they are going to do.