15 Minutes of Biometric Fame 2011 - Marnix de Nijs

15 Minutes of Biometric Fame highlights the paradoxes associated with recognition of entertainment industry celebrities and instant fame gained through Web 2.0 applications. It playfully discredits the reliability of Internet databases by feeding information on everyday individuals back into the system with ambiguous tagging. The work incorporates face-recognition software employed in surveillance and security applications and takes inspiration from camera dollies used in television and cinema. An independently operated camera is mounted on a crane that can move around a circular track. The camera seeks out and scans visitors’ facial features. Rather than identifying a person, the software compares his or her features with 75,000 ‘celebrity’ faces, ranging from artists to porn stars, in a preselected database. The visitor and his/her celebrity lookalike are then projected on a large screen. After a visitor is captured, matched and tagged, he or she is added to the database, uploaded to the Internet and hence promoted to instant stardom.

This work is distributed by V2_ Agency