The Digital Alchemist’s Book of Stuff

The Selfie

Like meme images selfies are something we probably do not need to explain to you. They are a form of public media expression that has evolved into a thing of their own because of networked social media, and to many, a genre of digital art.

While self-portraits have been around maybe as long as someone picked up a brush-like tool, as Vulture’s comprehensive article on the History of the Selfie notes:

These are not like the self-portraits we are used to. Setting aside the formal dissimilarities between these two forms—of framing, of technique—traditional photographic self-portraiture is far less spontaneous and casual than a selfie is. This new genre isn’t dominated by artists. When made by amateurs, traditional photographic self-portraiture didn’t become a distinct thing, didn’t have a codified look or transform into social dialogue and conversation. These pictures were not usually disseminated to strangers and were never made in such numbers by so many people. It’s possible that the selfie is the most prevalent popular genre ever.

The Opener: The Arts and Culture App

Google launched the Arts and Culture App as a means to connect people with a vast amount of art work

The Google Arts & Culture platform hosts millions of artifacts and pieces of art, ranging from prehistory to the contemporary, shared by museums across the world. But the prospect of exploring all that art can be daunting. To make it easier, we dreamt up a fun solution: connect people to art by way of a fundamental artistic pursuit, the search for the self … or, in this case, the selfie.

The idea is you take a selfie with the app, and let their experimental algorithm use facial recognition technology to try and match it to art in the collection.

Rather fun right? Perhaps you already tried it?

But as savvy digital alchemists who looked at data tracking, hopefully you night be curious about what happens to your face when its image goes to Google? They do say

(By the way, Google doesn’t use your selfie for anything else and only keeps it for the time it takes to search for matches.)

And it does come up before you use the app:

Do we know that? Hmmmm.

But there’s more to worry about. Many have noticed that the results of the match are much less successful if you don’t have a white face, suggesting there is a racial bias in this app. And it’s more than an art app, facial recognition has much wider uses, and researchers have shown accuracy is much higher if you are whiter.

We will run our own experiments with the app, which you can get for Android devices and for Apple devices.

By no means are you required to post your own face on line o test it, you can flip the camera around to forward facing, and try using images of faces. I tried a few experiments this week:

No facial match for dogs, sorry Felix.

Here I tried using a framed photo of my Mom, who is deceased. Sorry Mom

One of my childhood photos got mapped to a girl.

You may want to think about what is being matched here. And the implications for cameras in public places to do this.

More Resources on Selfies