It is interesting how much information you can find about someone online and this artist takes it one step further.
Key Details
- An artist’s new project shows the realities of social media—and video surveillance.
- Belgian artist Dries Depoorter has created a new social-media project where he takes an influencer’s pictures and shows the unfiltered video surveillance footage behind the picture.
- Depoorter posts the picture and video side by side on social media to give people the insight behind popular Instagram posts.
Why it’s news
The two-minute video footage not only shows the true reality behind social-media pictures, but it also shows how easy it is to find people with only a little bit of information.
The artist uses a website called EarthCam, which provides livestream feeds from big cities across the globe. He recorded the streams in a few cities and then searched Instagram for pictures taken in those areas, typically looking for influencers with more than 100,000 followers.
The software he created uses artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to scan the videos and find influencers in the act of taking the photographs that end up online, reports Bloomberg.
Many thought the project was to show the fakeness of social media, by showing the behind the scenes of getting the perfect shot. The reality is that the project shows that no one truly has privacy anymore.
“If this person can do this as an art piece, imagine what someone being paid by a big company can do with the same data, at scale, for purposes of making money, that won’t make a public tweet about it,” software developer Juan Alvarado says on Twitter.
