Decisive Mirror

Emotion recognition, psychometric profiling, and sentiment analysis are increasingly being used by companies, social media platforms, and others to draw conclusions about us. But algorithms don’t always come to the right conclusions about you. An algorithm after all, is only as accurate as the data set is it trained on.

Sebastian Schmieg has designed his own algorithm behind Decisive Mirror, which analyzes you based on less conventional traits, such as your “aliveness” or “imaginariness”. Decisive Mirror uses machine vision to assess you, but it might not yield the results you expect. This mirror might reminds you that your face, words, actions, and even emotions are being profiled every day based on categories that are arbitrary, random, or inaccurate.

Commissioned by HeK, Haus der elektronischen Künste, Basel

Text by Christy Lange (Tactical Tech)