Read Your Lips

Andrew Frost

The recent revelations about the US National Security Agency monitoring millions of phone calls and email messages, as well as the tapping of the phones of world leaders, and Australia’s own surveillance of Indonesian government communications, highlighted the observed and recorded nature of our modern society. Given the widespread, and for many people the completely unremarkable nature of these revelations, it was only a matter of time before artists turned their attentions to the experience of interaction with surveillance technologies.

In Eugenia Raskopoulos’s Read Your Lips, gallery visitors are tracked using facial recognition software, transferring an image of the visitor’s face to a large screen, then using computer software, records their lip movements and matches it to a randomly selected language database.  A ladder that slices through the galleries is a visual metaphor for the hierarchy of communications, the observed presumably at its bottom. Characterising data gathering as a kind of “soft violence” Raskopoulos’s system captures images but doesn’t save them, returning the visitor to the here and now to contemplate a technology that was designed to prevent violence becoming a symbol of repression.

Until February 16

Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington

http://www.acp.org.au

Pic: Eugenia Raskopoulos, computer screen sound file capture from Read Your Lips 2013.