Shi Zheng’s “Free Fall Study III” documents experiments in falling simulation from the video installation “Free Fall.” The vertical, narrow perspective of the work captures computer-simulated white sheet masks that keep falling downwards. As another layer in the work, a computer-vision recognition system surveils and detects how the image is moving. The facial recognition system then identifies whether the image of each falling mask matches the features of a human face. Numbers between 0.0 and 1.0 represent the approximation value of “human" identified by the machine compared to “real human.”

In today’s highly observed, studied, and analyzed world, vision machines powered by algorithms exist everywhere. Meanwhile, visual images are gradually becoming a computational product that has impacted the way we see and understand the world, and “meat vision” has to be mixed with and controlled by computer vision. The face-detection algorithms in this work programmatically translate complex human face information into numbers, which end up overly simplifying the diversity of what a face looks like. Thus, the falling “masks” in the work not only physically embody products—including facial processing and digital filters—but also epitomize what it means to be “human” in our data-flooded era.

施政的作品《自由落体III》中，由计算机模拟而成的纯白面膜无限下坠，纵向连接的显示屏幕呈现了作品自上而下的观看视角。作品的另一层画面则由机器视觉识别系统构成，即对影像内容的监控与识别，系统根据面部识别算法判断画面中坠落的面膜是否与人脸的特征吻合，蓝色显示框内，不断在“0–1”区间浮动的数值则代表了被机器辨别出的 “人” 与 “真实人类” 的近似值。在当下被机器与算法观察、研究、分析的世界里，视觉机器（vision machine）无处不在，而视觉图像也逐渐成为一种计算产物（computational product），影响着人类的自然视觉以及人类理解世界的方式。人的自然视觉不得不被计算机视觉（computer vision）混合、控制，算法程式化地将复杂的人脸信息转化为数据、过度简化了人类面部的多样性，因此作品中坠落的“面膜”既是对面部处理、数字滤镜等产物的物理体现，也是数据洪流时代中“人”的缩影。