Manuel Fernández sent a very nice email regarding the previous post on his GIF series. While it's polite and complimentary, he has a couple of issues:
But I think that the text [discusses] if these gifs are fake. I just wanted to clarify it. The text of the project says: "The project uses the face recognition software as pretext to generate a series of animated gif images emulating the process." [Also,] the project does not talk about ubiquity of surveillance.
Reply:
Thanks, Manuel.
I did read your statement before I posted and linked to it. What I wrote is interpretation.
Face-recognition-as-surveillance is a "hot button" issue it would be hard to ignore. I'd be derelict if I didn't at least mention it.
The point of the post was I don't care that much about art's relation to hot button issues but I liked the GIFs for other reasons.
What I hadn't considered before the update was that the green rectangle was instantly recognizable code for a particular product, since I'm not an iPhone user myself and kind of hate them. That is much more problematic to me -- the extent to which your GIFs are an in-joke for iPhone users and therefore a subtle form of brand promotion.
In my own work I make jokes about primitive paint programs but when I first started doing that I thought the pixelly drawings could be read as either MacPaint (Apple/Claris) or Microsoft Paintbrush. Mostly they were (seen as generic) and I was very uncomfortable the first time a gallery described them as "Microsoft Paintbrush drawings" (this was around '98).
Nowadays MSPaint has become synonymous with pixelly paint programs (even though they are changing it), people have forgotten MacPaint from the '80s, and I've even been accused of "loving Windows." Yipe, that's insane.