Decisive Mirror

Emotion recognition, psychometric profiling, and sentiment analysis are increasingly being used by companies, social media platforms, and others to draw conclusions about you. But algorithms don’t always come to the right conclusions. An algorithm after all, is only as accurate as the data set is it trained on.

Sebastian Schmieg has designed his own algorithm behind Decisive Mirror, which analyzes you based on less conventional traits, such as your “aliveness” or “imaginariness”. Decisive Mirroruses machine vision to assess you, but it might not yield the results you expect. This mirror might remind you that your face, words, actions, and even emotions are being profiled every day by technology based on categories that are arbitrary, random, or inaccurate.

Commissioned by HeK, House of Electronic Arts Basel.