The Anti Facial-Recognition Veil
The Anti Facial-Recognition Veil is a mask that wears with the ease of sunglasses. Made of silk, this light weight garment provides a veil of distortion, making a facial scan impossible.
Wrongful Arrests Due to Facial Recognition Technology Increase
The Anti Facial-Recognition Veil project is an educational process showing how tech intrudes and how the individual can push back. The Veil is a wearable art response to the machine and a protection against the invasive recording and scanning of our faces. With the rise in arrests from the miscalculation of algorithms, the veil interferes with the unwarranted scans of FRT surveillance cameras and recording devices.
Our faces and eyes, once seen as personal traits are now scanned and transcribed as data. Our current location and many of our personal details are mined, collected, and stored in a space where humanity doesn’t belong, and where individuality might be threatened with extinction. Not only are we being mined for our data, we could be targeted for crimes we didn’t commit.
As of early 2026, reports indicate a significant rise in both the adoption of facial recognition technology (FRT) by law enforcement and the number of documented wrongful arrests linked to its use.
Demographic Disparity: In the United States, nearly every known wrongful arrest linked to FRT has involved a Black individual. Research indicates algorithms can be up to 100 times more likely to misidentify people of color than white individuals.
We are also exploring the primitive nature of masks, such as the passport masks of the Dan people of Africa. The masks acted as "passports" to establish identity, provided protection against evil spirits during travel, and served as sacred items in initiations for boys and girls. As we are now facing a force that opposes nature, the veil will be our shield.
My plan is to have an interactive exhibit where people of all ages can see the technology in action and how to avoid it. I imagine cameras and screens , programed with FRT place throughout the exhibition area. The screens will show imagined details that appear as each “recognized” face is scanned. Participants can then wear the veil and observe the protection that it provides. They can alter the veils by mixing and matching the various features and skin tones as well.
Resistance Art:
A primitive solution for an advanced problem.
The Veil project addresses a collective threat and brings forth the idea that we can create tools to guard ourselves against it . The problem is, the centralization of this invasive tech, is used by government and corporation to assert control over large groups of people. We are observing a system that extracts information about you that you may not want to share.
How do we equip ourselves to travel in this machine terrain, while maintaining our autonomy and privacy to the best of our ability? How can we use art to survive the technocracy?
