We're all using our phones, our computers, and living a digital life that can be traced everywhere.

We're very much living in a surveillance society.

In the click of a button, we give our location data, our opinions, our connections.

We give away all our privacy.

We have now CCTV cameras that are connected to facial recognition technology, that is connected to artificial intelligence.

The ways how we are viewed and controlled are much more sophisticated than they used to be.

This exhibition is really focusing on two main themes.

One is we wanted to show deep history of surveillance technologies that are becoming ubiquitous today.

On the other hand, we wanted to also show that despite very pervasive surveillance, people have always found ways to evade, but also to criticize and to counter these surveillance technologies.

This is my studio with the painting machine here.

Oh, right.

Nice.

Yes.

This is also from the launch to the ISS.

The first thing as you enter the building are these really colorful dots on the windows, which are reminiscent of stained glass windows in churches.

The work hyperreality is an immersive installation throughout the entire Venda Museum.

It covers the museum windows with images that were printed in a special machine that they built at the studio.

The painting machine invites randomness to the process.

It invites paint drops that drop on the paintings until it reaches a level of obstructization.

Choosing a set of very intimate images, I agreed to open my private world to the viewers.

They're actually referencing images that she posted online of her work.

Some of those images are really political and some of them are really personal and really intimate.

At the same time, I use the painting machine to protect my privacy in a way by making them into a state of unrecognizability.

She's commenting on the fact that we are living our lives more in this world of images.

We sometimes are even more convinced of a representation and the image than of the actual reality that is in front of us.

If you look at these windows, you have a choice whether you focus on the image on the windows or on the real world behind it.

I think she struck a perfect balance where it's a real dilemma.

You have to make a choice what are you going to focus on.

I'm more interested in the human dimension of this story and why we comply to it, what we get from it.

That's what I'm interested in.

I see, so then F, G, H, which goes on this side.

The piece is entitled System Overload, and it began as a part of the research for the surveillance, counter-surveillance exhibition here at the Wende Museum.

I think attach the heads.

Once they're attached, then you lift the whole thing up.

In the beginning, we were really looking at the legacies of the Cold War, which is part of the mission of the museum, and trying to think about how facial recognition technologies were anticipated in some of the issues around border crossing, around who belonged and who didn't belong, and thinking about the impact of the Cold War in our own contemporary thinking.

Ken produced a mobile that is hovering above the exhibition, and the mobile contains photographs of sculptures from museums worldwide, art museums, anthropological museums.

He applied grids on these sculptures, and these grids refer to ways how faces were analyzed in the course of centuries.

It starts with the Renaissance Art Academy and it moves on up to current facial recognition grids.

I decided to highlight moments from the history of Western culture that have placed particular emphasis on the measuring of the face or the head as a way of evaluating individuals, of determining their status.

Okay, that looks nice.

Ideas about the interpretation of faces are literally as old as humankind, and they're already in Greek antiquity, but especially so in Renaissance period.

All kinds of theories how the shape of skulls and the shape of faces tell something about someone's character traits.

If you take a person of color and you begin to measure their head, those measurements might be used as a way of restricting their access to other kinds of rights like citizenship or free travel.

The pieces all point back to ideas of who belongs and who doesn't, but who will have full rights and who won't.

Those measuring systems just reflected the biases that already existed in society.

Biometric surveillance is surveillance that makes use of technologies that measure the human body.

Many technologies, like facial recognition, for instance, have a very deep history.

Even before we started trying to teach computers to analyze a human face or body, there were analog precursors to this technology that were aimed at training people an algorithm for analyzing a face, and these methods were used, for instance, to train border guards or forensic officers or secret agents.

Some traces of it are still very much alive and unconsciously incorporated in a lot of current computerized and digitalized technologies.

The starting point in terms of material of this exhibition was the archives from the border guards at Checkpoint Charlie that we have in this museum.

If you look at them, they're a page after page series of facial details; noses, eyes, ears, chins, and they're all characterized in a certain way.

The idea was to analytically look at faces and be able to very adequately describe every detail of the face.

The ultimate goal at Checkpoint Charlie was to identify people crossing the border with their passport photos.

We also have two board games here in the exhibition, and the idea of the board games is that you get pictures of existing people, and then with different facial details, you have to reconstruct these people as best as possible.

This was a French board game that was presented in 1950, and it was picked up, actually, by the Paris police department who saw this game and thought, "Hey, this is a good idea."

Police started developing kits that are basically like puzzles to make a composite portrait with.

They are composed of transparencies with different facial features on them, and you can lay them on top of each other to create a portrait of a suspected criminal or a suspected spy.

Each of these transparencies have a code, have a number, so you can create a code that describes a face, which makes it easy to communicate this to other police officers.

We have different artists who are actually using the technology to do something completely different.

One example is Gerhard Lang.

He worked together on this project with the West German police.

They were using this device with mirrors, four different mirrors that make it possible to make composite faces.

He combines elements of human faces, and he combined it with elements of birds, of insects, of even landscapes, to create completely new organisms.

I think that's one very interesting way to show that surveillance technology can also be used in a very positive and creative way.

Police in the US and the UK, and also in Poland used these systems.

Meanwhile, there was also a lot of research and development going on, which was state-sponsored, which focused on computer facial recognition.

The archives of W. W. Bledsoe, who was a researcher in Palo Alto, before that became Silicon Valley, show these early attempts to take these identikit-like approaches and use them to teach a computer to analyze a face.

In these early research materials, that, for instance, the training material they used, their portrait photos, are mainly of white men, and nobody thinks that that's a problem.

On top of that, sometimes the racialized approach is quite open.

Bledsoe, he actually pitched an idea to a government agency to develop race identification algorithms.

I think it's striking that a lot of the technical problems, but also a lot of the cultural biases that have haunted computer facial recognition for decades are already there in the earliest attempts at creating it.

Another one of the figures is a depiction of Lenin, and it's from the Vendas collection.

It is overlaid with a linear drawing derived from facial recognition technology.

Part of it was trying to think about the role of that representation representation of an individual, but the way that image functions in society.

Then to think about those ideas of identification as they apply to individuals of different races and classes, and the injustice between the excessive number of Black and brown individuals that are identified through facial recognition technology, according to some recent studies, and how does that kind of technology exist today?

Sometimes we feel more exposed to surveillance outside our house or outside of our safe place.

Eventually, the place where we feel safest is our mobile device, and this is the place where we're most exposed to third-party companies that just drink our data away.

I think we're now at a point of this absolute willingness we have to spill all of our personal details online, and have struck this bargain with big tech or with social media companies that we will give them all this personal data in return for the opportunity to connect to other people and also to present ourselves, maybe show off.

This tension between, on the one hand, the wish to connect and to communicate, and on the other hand, the fear to be controlled and surveyed and observed with unknown consequences.

For us, it's very important to not just share the story of surveillance as something that is more and more encompassing and the very depressing story of how we are controlled, it's also the story of how we can escape control and how we can turn it around.

There are good reasons to be scared or angry about these developments and all the work and resources that went into monitoring populations.

I'm really happy that we also included this second theme of counter surveillance, because it shows you the courage and also the humor and the creativity of people who managed to evade surveillance, and also criticize it, and it's exposing a part that their surveillors would rather not think about or not have us know about.