Social Control Prototype #1 - example.asterisques.com
PFSC1 is an application that determines the online browsing history of an individual through computer vision.
Specifically, based on your clothes, it’ll indicate whether you might browse 4Chan’s fashion board or Reddit’s MaleFashion subreddit. (It is very likely that you visit none of these websites.)
The main thesis of this piece is the idea that allegiance to an online community has a greater effect on one’s life than to a country.
This is a tool to track people in a post-nation world.
This art piece / project is based on Christiane Paul’s concept of Neomateriality, which explores the way our enmeshment with digital technologies changes not only our relationships with these materialities but also our representation as subjects. I’ve chosen here fashion but PFSC1 is an idea that can be expanded to many other areas. We could try to link make-up to which blog or YouTuber one watches. The implication here being that the content we browse / the communities we frequent influence material choices we make IRL.
The process behind this tool is simple, you can do it. One, build a scraper that collects all the images of people on the public profiles of the individuals who interact with the content. Two, train a machine learning model on identifying your designated groups. Three, deploy! The ML classifier based on the images of the profiles will build an approximation of who visits that content. PFSC1 is just a website now but it could be easily loaded onto an app and as you walk around with your smartphone you could attempt to classify people by the online content they consume.
Or even an Instagram filter!
What I find particularly interesting about Neomateriality is the idea that through it we learn how the machine perceives us, or how it “waves back”. This attempt at classification is by design broken as the model cannot contain all of humanity’s multitudes, but as it tries to fill in the gaps, we see the machine’s - and its maker’s - very own flaws.
Check out “From Immateriality to Neomateriality: Art and the Conditions of Digital Materiality” by Christiane Paul!