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Arts & Communication Computer vision in tactical AI art

electoral politics, Smile to Vote highlights the influence of
AI-powered biometric profiling on democratic processes,
political convictions, self-determination, and privacy.

Targeting the use of CV for algorithmic decision-
making in the human resources (HRs) business, Varvara
Guljajeva, and Mar Cane’s Keep Smiling (2022) “aims
to scrutinize automated hiring, skills-testing, and
dismissal systems [and] reflect on the implications of
AI use in the hiring process.” 44,45 It also exemplifies how
artworks’ critical impact can be compromised when
the handling of sensitive issues excessively relies on
the more compelling but unacknowledged precedents.
Assuming the role of job interviewees, this online work’s
Figure 2. Christian Moeller, Cheese (2003). Installation view. Photograph
courtesy of the artist visitors interact with an AI hiring agent, whose requests
to smile for an indefinite period they inevitably fail,
recognition, CV, and NLP routines over online protocols resulting in the loss of the fictional job. The gameplay
to harvest one million Facebook profiles, filter out 250,000 mixes the caricatural remediation of an online job
profile photographs, custom-tag their facial expressions, interview with the insinuations of related AI issues,
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and post them as new profiles on a fictitious dating website such as “fauxtomation.” However, it offers no helpful
called Lovely Faces. In 5 days while Lovely Faces was online, insights into the controversies surrounding the trend of
the artists received several letters from Facebook’s lawyers, “augmenting” HR business with AI; instead, the artists
11 lawsuit warnings, and five death threats. rely on a written introduction and conference papers
about the work. Rather than disrupting the underlying
Some artists repurpose CV within the broader logic of AI-powered HR, Keep Smiling merely subverts
(international or electoral) contexts of politics. For one of its mechanisms – automated emotion detection –
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instance, Kyle McDonald’s Sharing Faces (2013 – 2014) within a simplified fictional setting, thus rendering their
utilized CV with astounding economy to mediate empathy problematic social consequences somewhat easier to
in a telematic interaction between people in two countries tolerate. Moreover, although the artists acknowledge the
with historically uneasy relations. The work was installed work’s relationship with Moeller’s Cheese, Peterhaensel’s
for 8 months concurrently in Anyang, South Korea, and Smile to Vote, and Coralie Vogelaar’s Random String
Yamaguchi, Japan. At each location, a camera/display setup of Emotions (2018, discussed below), they omit
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emulated in real-time the current visitor’s facial expressions mentioning its striking resemblance to Carrie Sijia
and poses with their closest matches from a cumulative Wang’s An Interview with ALEX released in 2020, whose
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library of visitors’ images captured in the opposite location. central part places visitors in a 12-min job interview with
In Smile to Vote (2017 – 2019), Alexander Peterhaensel a fictional AI-ran corporate HR system called ALEX
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elaborated on Moeller’s concept in Cheese to make an (Figure 3). This earlier but more elaborately structured
engaging satire of technopolitics. Visitors of this interactive online project delivers a stronger narrative about the
installation enter a voting booth where a camera captures roles of AI in relational manipulation, job precarity, and
their portraits and sends them to the Smile to Vote gamification of labor.
software. It uses OpenCV to “deduce” the visitor’s political Reflecting and extending their surveillance art
conviction and make the appropriate voting decision by predecessors’ approach to video monitoring technologies,
comparing their facial features with a dataset of portraits these works employ CV in experiential arrangements that
pre-classified by unequivocal political orientation (party underline visitors’ presence and hint at the human roles
members and election candidates). The percentage of the in highlighting the consequences of the widespread AI
visitor’s physiognomic congruency with eligible parties is application.
displayed as a bar chart on the screen, and a voting receipt
is printed out for collection. By transferring the principle 2.2. Control and conditioning
of Alibaba’s “Smile to Pay” service into the context of Mediated supervision and automated deliberation are
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7 The Alibaba online shopping website has used the facial prominent surveillance art topics, and the applications
identification/payment system “Smile to Pay” since of CV in these control and command mechanisms
September 2017. provide plentiful pathways to tap into their (ab)uses

Volume 2 Issue 3 (2024) 5 doi: 10.36922/ac.2282