Patricia de Vries: Masks and Camouflage as Artistic Cryptographic Strategies
Channel: Aksioma
Date: 27/06/2019

Talk by Patricia de Vries at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, Department for Visual Communication.
Ljubljana, 6 March 2018

Realised in the framework of the "Crypto Design" workshop.
https://aksioma.org/cryptodesign/

Over the past years, a growing number of artists have formulated a critique over the ubiquity of identity recognition technologies. Specifically, the use of these technologies by state security programs, tech-giants and multinational corporations has met with opposition and controversy. A popular artistic form of resistance to recognition technology is sought in cryptographic masks. Zach Blas, Leo Selvaggio, Sterling Crispin and Adam Harvey are among a group of internationally acclaimed artists who have developed subversive anti-facial recognition crypto-masks that disrupt identification technologies. In this lecture, Patricia de Vries explores the ontological underpinnings of these popular and widely exhibited crypto-mask projects.