Michael Day
Power Portraits, (2017)
For this piece, a series of photographs of board members of major tech companies were passed through Google’s Vision API, and the resulting facial landmark datasets were printed as a set of posters. The posters were printed on brightly coloured backgrounds, to attract attention in the same way that advertising imagery often does. The face landmarks are represented as small circles and the outline boundary of the detected face is shown as a rectangle. Each face is shown at a similar scale and while the faces are represented in an abstracted way, the differences can be worked out by the viewer when the images are shown in a series, allowing visual comparison between them. In this work, the actual faces of the people who make decisions about the governance of companies that develop invasive or compulsive technologies had one of these technologies turned on their own images. I intended this to puncture the sense that board members of tech companies are themselves invisible and inscrutable, appearing only through their mediated image and through the products they are responsible for managing.