Thanks for Showing Your Face

Thanks for Showing Your Face is an installation that took place at Morphin in Berlin, and consisted of a face-detecting camera collecting images of all the visitors’ faces – which was printed in a little booklet during the course of the evening. The booklet was then handed out to all the people present, as a little souvenir of the moment they all shared. Face detection technology has a pretty bad reputation, and understandably so – but to plainly write it off as ‘evil technology' is ignorant at best, and doesn’t solve any of the real issues associated with it. As designers and artists, we need to challenge this notion by proposing a more nuanced and transparent side of the tech that surrounds us. After all, technology only as malicious as the intentions of the people who use ut. How can evil technology be used for a nice cause?