Tropical Camouflage

The art of deceiving has gained a new tool with machine learning and its ability to recognize and recreate patterns. But when used covertly dangers lurk: ‘Mass surveillance or social media manipulation‘ are just a few of the negative headlines. To draw attention to these risks, the project presents a real application scenario.

A GAN algorithm was trained on tourist photographs to create a camouflage pattern. The resulting suit subsequently functions in the vacation destination said photos were taken in. An indoor water park was used as a test environment. It features an ideal recreation of the perfectly imagined vacation paradise - a fake of an phantasmal image created by advertisements and staged beauty shots. Here, Jean Beaudrillard’s philosophical treatise ‚Simulacres et Simulation‘ seems more existent than ever. A sort of hyperreal copy were the original is unable to be located.

Together with: Joscha Brüning