Kate Rose | SITUATIONS/Strike Limited Edition T-shirt | 2020 06.10. – 14.10.2020 | online

SITUATION #211

The sharp increase in the number of vehicles in recent decades has strengthened the public and private need for more control over road users. Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR) are now in use in many places – whether for securing parking garages, for collecting tolls or for the purpose of police traffic surveillance. But these systems are flawed, as the U.S. hacker, designer and activist Kate Rose demonstrates in her fashion line "Adversarial Fashion". The rectangular patterns on the garments, arranged in a specific way, are read by ALPRs as license plates and thus feed junk data into the systems – a way of not only highlighting the weak points of this technology, but also undermining governmental surveillance at the same time.

For SITUATIONS/Strike, Kate Rose designed a limited edition of 60 unisex T-shirts, which are available through the artist's website. Instead of mere numbers, an excerpt of the US-american photographer and author Trevor Paglen's blogpost "Is Photography Over?" which was written for the Fotomuseum blog Still Searching... is printed across the license plates on the t-shirt, saying:

"How do we see the world with machines? What happens if we think about photography in terms of imaging systems instead of images? How can we think about images made by machines for other machines? What are the implications of a world in which photography is both ubiquitous and, curiously, largely invisible?"

Order the SITUATIONS/Strike Limited Edition T-shirt here: adversarialfashion.com/products/unisex-strike-situations-t-shirt

More about Aversarial Fashion: adversarialfashion.com