Free Fall
2020
Dual-channel Video Installation
Dimensions variable, portrait orientation
11 min 07 sec, loop

Free Fall is a dual-channel video installation co-produced by media art group RMBit for the solo exhibition Bitclave at Imagokinetics, Hangzhou. Two vertically connected display panels have constituted a narrow perspective of the work in which pure white sheet masks simulated by computer keeps falling downward. Another layer in the work consists of a computer vision recognition system that surveils and detects the moving image. The facial recognition system identifies whether the image of each falling sheet mask matches the features of the human face. The floating values between 0 and 1 in the blue bounding box represent the approximation value of "human" identified by the machine compared to “real human.”

In today’s world observed, studied, and analyzed by machines and algorithms, vision machines exist everywhere. Meanwhile, visual images are gradually becoming a computational product that has impacted the way we see and understand the world, and “meat vision” has to be mixed with and controlled by computer vision. The face detection algorithms programmatically translate complex human face information into numbers, which end up overly simplifying the diversity of what a face looks like. Thus, the falling “masks” in the work not only physically embodies products including facial processing and digital filter but also epitomize “human” in the era of data flood.