NORMALIZI.NG

What does normal look like?

Mushon Zer-Aviv

This exhibit aims to analyze and understand how we decide who looks more “normal”. By contributing to the dataset and choosing between faces you deem more normal, the machine analyzes your decisions and will add you to its algorithmic map of normality.

In the late 1800s, the French forensics pioneer Alphonse Bertillon, father of the mugshot, developed ‘Le Portrait Parle’ (the speaking portrait), a system for standardizing, indexing and classifying the human face. His statistical system was never meant to criminalize the face, but it was later widely adopted by both the eugenics movement and the Nazis to do exactly that.

This exhibit automates Alphonse’s speaking portraits and visualizes how today’s systematic discrimination is aggregated, amplified and conveniently hidden behind the seemingly objective black box of artificial intelligence.

Commissioned by Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin. The artist wishes to thank Adam Kariv for developing the code for NORMALIZI.NG.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer, researcher, educator and media activist based in Tel Aviv. His love/hate relationship with data informs his design work, art pieces, activism, research, teaching, workshops & city life. His is currently writing a non-fiction book about friction - a design theory of change. Among Mushon’s collaborations, he is the CO-founder of Shual.com – a foxy design studio; and multiple government transparency and civic participation initiatives with the Public Knowledge Workshop; Mushon also designed the maps for Waze.com and led the design of Localize.city. Mushon is an alumni of Eyebeam art + technology center in New York. He is a senior faculty member at Shenkar College and has previously he taught at NYU, Parsons, and Bezalel.