2091 : The Ministry of Privacy

For the past 2 years, China has been conducting a massive crackdown against Muslim-minority communities in its vast western Xinjiang region. Some of the most advanced surveillance technologies, such as facial recognition and DNA collection are being massively deployed in the region so as to monitor every aspect of the inhabitant’s life. A major data leak from February 2019 has revealed that SenseNets, a Chinese facial recognition company, is constantly tracking the location of more than 2.5 million muslim people in Xinjiang, using 6.7 million trackers tagged with descriptions such as “mosque”, “hotel,” “internet cafe” and other places where surveillance cameras are likely to be found.

The series The Ministry of Privacy is exploring the mechanism of facial recognition technologies used by the Chinese government to monitor and oppress the inhabitants of the Xinjiang region. To do so, I travelled to Kashgar, one of the last bastions of the Uyghur culture in Xinjiang, and probably the most monitored city of the region, where I’ve photographed the daily life of the inhabitants.

Later, I’ve uploaded the pictures into facial recognition softwares, developed and installed on my computer in collaboration with William Attache, a french IT engineer. The software we developed are similar to the ones used by the Chinese government in the region to track its inhabitants. The operating systems have then exported and drawn the respective biometric facial informations on the faces of the people that are appearing on the photographs. Depending on the software, some are displayed through red points - called facial landmark - other though Delaunay diagram, an efficient alternative for mapping the faces.

Through this creative process, The ministry of Privacy reveals the intrusiveness and the dangerousness of this invisible technology, while documenting and paying tribute to the last remains of these communities’ vibrant culture, before its planned disappearance. In this new documentary approach, the final photographs are blurring the borders between reality and virtuality, but are also embodying in the same picture, a glimpse of the future and the ruins of the past.

Maxime Matthys