A textile pattern can be enough for an algorithm to stop recognizing you as a person.
That is what Simon Weckert tested with “Digital Camouflage”, a T-shirt created after the deployment of AI-powered cameras in Kottbusser Tor, Berlin, last August. The garment uses a method called TC-EGA to generate an adversarial design: while it is visible to anyone, object-detection software labels everyone walking around with the classic green “person” box… except the person wearing it.
The question Weckert leaves us with is unsettling: if a fabric can disable a recognition system, how much confidence does that technology deserve when it is used to monitor public spaces?
Today it is an art experiment documented in Netzpolitik and Dezeen, but tomorrow that same vulnerability could be a sought-after tool for those who precisely need not to be identified by the authorities.