Your name
Marcel Top
Place of birth
Ypres, Belgium
Place where you live now
Brussels, Belgium
3 words to describe you
Curious, activism, research
Why do you take pictures?
Trying to visualise things I'm worried about
Where do you get your inspiration?
socio-political events and friends
Who are your influences?
Aldous Huxley, Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl
What determines the subject matter you choose?
News, socio-political events, there is no process, it just happens
What impact would you like your art to have?
Hopefully change something
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Aldous Huxley's books
Is there anything you want to add?
art is political

Reversed surveillance
Project statement

Following the enactment of new legislation allowing the use of AI-enhanced surveillance in France (Law No. 2023-380), Marcel Top uses accessible algorithms and available protest footage to simulate how the use of Algorithmic Video Surveillance (AVS) can impact a protest. Regarding demonstrators, AVS uses a series of algorithms that can flag abnormal behaviour in real time, assisting the police in identifying and possibly removing suspects from the crowd.

Starting from a three-hour livestream of the Paris protest, and using the software Video Content Analysis and an AI trained to recognise the seven facial expressions associated with emotions, Top collected around 30,000 faces and categorised them according to the emotional readings assigned by the algorithm. The process revealed that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the AI’s conclusions regarding people’s emotional state were mostly inaccurate: the result of forced categorisation via metrics that do not consider overall emotions but the mathematic average of facial expressions linked to them.

In a second phase, Top reversed the dynamics of surveillance. He trained an algorithm to recognise different police units during protests in France. Using more protest videos and livestreams, he created a police unit recognition algorithm and the blue print for a facial recognition tool that, with the right database, could theoretically link the police officers’ faces to their RIO (Relevé d’Identité Opérateur), the French police’s unique identification number.

In a time where machines are tasked to decode human emotions and authorities are allowed to make decisions based on probability rather than actual events, every new law that seeks to oppress protestors in the name of safety confirms that it is too late to undo surveillance.

Top’s project originates from the belief that, as it is unlikely to revert surveillance and its effects on society, society should explore ways to reverse it.

marcel top
@marceltoptop