About the Work
For my Photography II final I photographed the people I love, with their permission, and ran every portrait through face detection and emotion analysis software I wrote in Python. Then I printed what the machine saw: the boxes, the labels, the guesses about age, race, gender, and feeling.
The machine is confidently wrong in ways that are funny until they are not. It reads my own face as a man in his twenties. It reads a piglet I am holding as four middle-aged men experiencing fear. It assigns my partner one race until he sticks out his tongue, and then assigns him another. A man in his seventies comes back as age 33.
These are the same kinds of systems that get pointed at faces in stores, airports, and police databases. Readable is a small, personal audit of what they actually see. The code lives in a companion repo where every portrait has its analysis attached.
// interactive: let the machine read you
The software that analyzed these portraits is confident about everyone. Want to know what it sees in you?