Shadows Of Our Ancestors. 2005.

A generative net art project that explores surveillance, identity, data collection and the politics of facial recognition. The work consists of a database of 11,111 faces gathered through Google image searches and re-mediated within a constantly evolving virtual environment. These images are assembled into a digital sphere, creating a shifting landscape of human identities drawn from the vast, unfiltered circulation of images online.

The sphere operates as a visual database, transforming individual faces into part of a larger computational system. As the environment updates, the relationships between images change, creating an unstable portrait of humanity in which individual identities become fragments of a much larger network of information. The work's provocative invitation — Find yourself, find the killer, find the terrorist — confronts the viewer with the assumptions underpinning contemporary surveillance technologies. It raises questions about how faces become data, how identities are classified, and how images gathered from the internet can be repurposed within systems of observation, suspicion and control. By placing thousands of faces within a single virtual space, Shadows Of Our Ancestors exposes the tension between the individual and the collective. A face may appear to offer immediate recognition, yet within a database it becomes another searchable data point, detached from its original context. The work challenges the belief that visual information is neutral or that identity can be reliably determined from appearance alone.

As an early exploration of networked imagery and computational identity, Shadows Of Our Ancestorsanticipates contemporary debates around facial recognition, artificial intelligence, biometric surveillance and the unrestricted reuse of personal images. The virtual sphere becomes both a monument to the abundance of online imagery and a troubling mirror of a world in which everyone can potentially become an object of observation.

Available in an edition of 3. Custom made software, database.

Netart now taken offline.  It still works and is available for collectors and exhibitions.