Simon Weckert’s Digital Camouflage is a shirt designed to ‘trick’ the computer-vision systems that are increasingly watching public spaces. It has been engineered to confuse the object-recognition algorithms used in surveillance, as a comment on the technology that is currently being installed at Berlin’s Kottbusser Tor and is already watching streets in other cities, from London to Los Angeles. “In Berlin, what is being switched on is more than a camera,” Weckert writes on his website. “It is a behaviour scanner – software that sorts what every passer-by does into ‘normal’ and ‘suspicious’ – the first camera legally allowed to film the city’s public space without any specific cause. To isolate a punch, sister systems have to classify dancing, hugging and countless other harmless gestures too and everyone is read, all the time, under a quiet reversal of the presumption of innocence. Kottbusser Tor is only the template in Berlin, with three more locations across the city next.” Berlin is at the beginning of a curve whose end is already visible elsewhere, he adds. In the United States, automated surveillance arrived years ago with well over a hundred thousand networked cameras logging vehicles and movements across thousands of towns and their data flowing into databases that the police and federal agenciescan search without a warrant. This year has become the year of the pushback, with dozens of communities voting to cancel their camera contracts and civil-rights organisations are campaigning to have the networks taken down. “The question of who is allowed to read the public street has entered the mainstream and this work stands in that moment, on both sides of the Atlantic,” Weckert writes. The pattern of the Digital Camouflage shirt is built on what is known as an adversarial attack – a way of manipulating the visual data a machine receives so that it fails to interpret what is in front of it. Worn on the body, it targets exactly the features these systems look for when searching for a human figure. The algorithm no longer registers a person and the wearer becomes, in effect, invisible to the machine – present to every human eye but absent to the model. “Whether any specific government system reacts the same way, no one outside can verify and that opacity is precisely part of what the work makes visible – cities are deploying systems that cannot be independently tested, while the same class of technology is undone by a piece of fabric,” Weckert writes. “Decades of research suggest that cameras rarely prevent crime – they displace it into the next street, or produce a feeling of safety rather than safety itself. A camera cannot step in when something happens and worse, it teaches bystanders not to step in either – someone official is watching, so no one has to. Meanwhile, the manufacturer of Berlin’s system is being kept secret.“Digital Camouflage is not a tool for evading the police, and it is not a promise of anonymity. No pattern can promise to defeat every system under every condition, but worn in public, it is a visible signal that being read by machines is not something everyone consents to. A watched square changes people before any alarm goes off. When systems that cannot be publicly tested can be undone by a piece of fabric, how much trust should we place in them before we hand them the public square, in Berlin or anywhere else?” The work was documented in photo and video on site at Kottbusser Tor, and a share of the proceeds from every shirt goes to organisations defending digital civil rights and fighting the expansion of surveillance. Simon Weckert describes himself “as modern-day digital wizard and mischievous tinkerer, revelling in sharing insights on everything from generative design to physical computing.” His creations are part tech, part art and part social critique, aiming to unravel complex issues in a way that makes people laugh, think, or maybe just scratch their heads. His artworks and performances have been shown at V&A Dundee, Ars Electronica Linz, CCBT Tokyo, chi K11 artspace Shanghai, Löwenbräukunst Zurich, Vitra Design Museum, EDF Foundation Paris, Transmedial Berlin and Bauhaus Museum 68 Weimar.