[rohrpost] #technofeministcare – 1st of May Protest – Donate your Face!

[Cornelia Sollfrank]

Dear friends and colleagues,

#purplenoise becomes active again! On the occasion of the International Labour Day, 1st of May 2020, #purplenoise takes a position and launches a large-scale campaign. Combining online and offline activities, the aim of the protest is to take the current crisis as an occasion for comprehensive change. Main feature of our protest is a mask that we have designed especially for this intervention.

Please join our protest! Add your photo wearing the mask to our social media sites using #technofeministcare. On our website, we provide instructions on how you can make your own – either as virtual layer over your digital portrait, or as a functional mask for your physical environment.

Our #technofeministcare manifesto is a list of statements, observations and demands that aims at raising awareness and mobilizing as many as possible.
Please feel invited to contribute to the manifesto by making additions to the pad or download the PDF-version. Both available here:
http://artwarez.org/projects/purplenoise/

If you just would like to donate you face and leave it us to cover it properly, please send your photo to purplenoise2018 at gmail.com.

#purplenoise is an interdisciplinary technofeminist research group that uses real-life events to explore social media as the arena for large-scale political
manipulation. The research methodolody includes intervention, infiltration, manipulation, technofeminist propaganda, poetry, fake news, love, and anger.

#technofeministcare #purplenoise

Homepage: https://www.obn.org/purplenoise/
Facebook: @purplenoiseup or https://www.facebook.com/PurpleNoiseUP
Twitter: @purplenoise1 or https://twitter.com/PurpleNoise1
Instagram: @purplenoiseup or https://www.instagram.com/purplenoiseup/

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Stay at home, or wear a mask.
All over the world, government officials are finally clear in their announcement
of the measures against the pandemic: we are all asked to mask ourselves. This
is a welcome turn after the longstanding ban on face coverings. The new regulations
mean, if you want to be safe in public space you have to be anonymous. We
become unidentifiable if we want to be in the public space. We need to be part
of the masked crowd populating the streets, almost faceless and almost expressionless
– except for the way we walk and move our bodies.

Hidden from view, our smiles will become an intimate expression.
Amidst a homogenous mask wearing crowd, how will people show off their differences
and privileges? The benefits of makeup, a nicely broomed beard and plastic
surgery are rendered invisible in the public sphere. Masks now become the
new item for individual expression as well as status: the big fashion brands are
already taking steps to fix this bug by launching face masks for their spring
collection, so that you can match your Gucci shoes with a Gucci mask.

Computer vision or a lack thereof.
A homogenous crowd can be authority's sci-fi fantasy or nightmare. Those laws
against niquab wearing need to be rethought of, as the government actually wants
us to hide our faces. It is also time for all CC cameras to be turned off now!
Their facial recognition algorithms will stop receiving data about our whereabouts,
meaning that we win the privacy battle in the streets -while losing it
online.

No surveillance?
Our faces are still visible in online protests, but it is hard to know if these
faces are real or created by algorithms; we can use AI generated faces as noise
to blur our traces. As for the street protests, we will need to figure out how
to maintain a distance of two meters from our peers and still form a purple
bloc. It used to be the case that only riot police had the right to hide their
faces, now protesters will have this privilege too!

So is the mask a big equator?
Even though the danger of the virus is the same for everyone, the crisis that it
has created is not. Many people cannot afford to stay at home, because they risk
their jobs, others who have already been made redundant, or who have barely
survived the last financial crisis, only to be catapulted into the heart of a
worse one.

Everyone will be wearing masks, but our screams will be audible.
The #purplenoise mask is for those who make noise even when they are being
forced to be invisible –hidden at home or faceless in the streets. It's for the
people who have carried the weight of the pandemic, precarious laborers, care
workers and families at home. We stay safe, but we defend diversity against
homogenization, while we remain aware of the rising inequality.


#technofeministcare – 1st of May Protest – Donate your Face!