Hasta La Ideas

Over the next months we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year’s Core77 Design Awards! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

Designer: Adam Harvey – Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
Location: New York City, New York, USA
Category: Speculative Objects/Concepts
Award: Student Winner

CV Dazzle: Open Source Camouflage

CV Dazzle is camouflage from face detection. It is a response to the growing prowess of computer vision technology and the resulting phenomenon of shrinking privacy.

This project arose out my interest in photography and our changing relationship to surveillance and privacy. I was excited by the revolutionizing effect of digital photography in the last decade but also concerned about the repercussions of our increasingly interconnected cultures and sophisticated visual-data mining tools. The impetus for designing a camouflage against face detection was to show how we could adapt to occularcentric, surveillance-societies without retreating into anonymity, and, in doing so, celebrate style and augment privacy.

Core77: How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

I was sitting in my studio during the NYC heat wave and tuned into the livecast from Palo Alto. It was great to watch it as a livecast and to see and hear the jurors during their decision making process.

What’s the latest news or development with your project?

I’m going to be porting my codebase over to OpenFrameworks and starting a GitHub project where others programmers can download what I’ve done so far. Non-programmers will also be able to contribute by submitting photos of makeup and fashion accessories to an online inspiration repository. Offline, I’m going to be working on several fashion accessories.

What was the inspiration behind your project?

It was inspired by my friend’s duplicitous halloween costume.

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.

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