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Level of Confidence

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Level of Confidence commemorates the mass kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa normalista school in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The project consists of a face-recognition camera that has been trained to tirelessly look for the faces of the disappeared students. The system uses algorithms to find which student’s facial features look most like those of the person in front of the camera and gives a ‘level of confidence’ on how accurate the match is, in a percentage. The biometric surveillance algorithms used – Eigen, Fisher and LBPH – are typically used by military and police forces to look for suspicious individuals whereas in this project they are used to search for victims instead. The piece will always fail to make a positive match, as the students were likely murdered and burnt in a massacre where government, police forces, and drug cartels were involved. The commemorative side of the project, however, is the relentless search for the students and the overlap of their image with the public’s own facial features.