In the summer of 2025 I got to produce The Apocalypse Museum for my good friends and freak geniuses, Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives and Gavin Grindon. The labyrinthine immersive installation was set "on fire" in an overgrown, derelict corner of the Greenpeace Fields at Glastonbury Festival, subversively exploring how to avoid the end of the world, or "how to stop worrying and start disobeying".
Installed within it, under a tangle of CCTV cameras, I also contributed this artwork, How To Break Your Face, which became a live workshop during the festival. It focused on sharing the history, politics and DIY application of the activist tactic known as Computer Vision Dazzle: the creative tool of resistance that is anti-surveillance makeup.
Dazzle uses high contrast, asymmetrical makeup to disrupt how machines read our faces, and can make one invisible to 2D surveillance cameras.
Why is this important? Facial recognition systems are built into many CCTV cameras and already used by UK police & corporate advertisers, and rarely questioned but are already shaping the world around us. They operate without our consent, often illegally, reducing our faces to data points to be tracked, stored, and sold. Under surveillance capitalism, our bodies become raw material for profit and control, used to predict or influence our behavior.
It’s applications are also super racist; UK police officers have been found using search settings that disproportionately misidentify Black faces. In the US, ICE deploys error-prone algorithms that misidentify people of color, targeting Black and Brown communities through mass surveillance without consent, and reinforcing systemic discrimination in the currently unfolding horror.
I made this artwork onsite, designing and painting original Dazzle patterns onto three 3D sculpted faces (that I cast in plaster from our festival build crew), each sculpture explores how we can creatively confuse facial detection systems. I then tested them using phone face filters, which mimic much of the same tracking tech used in street-level 2D surveillance systems.
In my workshop I led people to understand how to 'break their faces', painting each other, then tested their designs with their phones. When the filters failed to attach, floated, or flickered, we knew we had hacked the algorithm. Also, there were some dodgy 'undercover' journos from The Times who wrote an article about it.
As an artist and activist I seek to find playful ways to mess with draconian systems of control and oppression. Surveillance tech is constantly evolving so we need to keep checking back, keep adapting to its next mutations. I’m currently making a zine on other counter-surveillance tactics, please get in touch if you’d like a copy!
Special thank you to Libby, Chano and Lauren for their faces and to Kieran and Danny and the Greenpeace team for being such awesome creative techies helping me install the work! Of course, thanks for having me again, Greenpeace, and the brilliant, horrible-museum-makers, Darren & Gavin!
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