Images: Metincan Güzel
Surveillance technologies have transformed over time, shifting their objective from collecting visual information the human body produces to generating human bodies for producing the assigned information. As a side affect of this process, the mentioned body was artificialized to perform its given objective. Becoming a fake paratrooper during World War to deceive reconnaissance, or a 3D-human for training AI surveillance to detect behaviors. Kaan’s body however always had to perform both binaries, constantly to detect and deceive. Being hyper-aware towards all modes of monitoring has triggered him to become hyper protective of his bodily data. By self-training his body to produce ‘biased information’, he began invalidating any visual inference. Until his accurate identity was artificialized.
‘Training for: A Biased Confrontation’ investigates the affect of the reciprocal artificiality between surveillance and the human body as it carries an ever-growing urgency. With constituting a spatial confrontation between these two actors in a training environment, Kaan Hiçyılmaz’s embodied experience of being surveilled is unpacked following a threefold: prompts, props, and performance. Prompts facilitate instructional narratives for the training stations, interpreted from military deception techniques. Equipment for exercising detection keypoints are activated respectively, each corresponding to a different diversion ‘About:’ his body. Cameras surrounding the installation space operate with a trained computer model to decipher his constant effort for achieving the biased codes. While the viewers slowly take part in as surveillants, the whole interplay becomes an active question: Will the actors strive to be more compliant or more biased towards each other?
'ABOUT: MY POSTURE', training station to exercise POWER
'ABOUT: MY EMOTIONS', training station to exercise INTIMIDATION
[1] Webcam and white board with vinyl lettering attached to a light stand, [2] Screen operating with pose estimation model,
[3] Facial training piece made from straps and D rings placed on 3D printed head, [4] Elastic bands attached to metal chain