@ Ars Electronica Festival 2025
Experience firsthand how facial recognition systems track and process your biometric data across interconnected environments.
A research and sensitization project by the Institute for Networks and Security, Johannes Kepler University
The goal of this project is to educate the public about omnipresent facial recognition technologies and their impact on privacy by allowing festival-goers to personally experience how such systems function and what data is processed.
This time-limited research and sensitization project focuses on biometric data processing for research, awareness, and artistic purposes, helping visitors understand the pervasive nature of facial recognition in our daily lives.
The system consists of a main camera and up to 10 smaller sensor-stations positioned at different festival locations. These cameras capture images and use facial recognition to identify and track visitors as they move between stations.
The system processes biometric features (stored as "Embeddings"), timestamps, location data, and optionally, user-assigned pseudonyms to demonstrate how modern surveillance systems function.
Importantly, the actual images are not stored - only the extracted biometric data and associated metadata are processed and temporarily stored on a secure server at JKU.
Ars Electronica Festival 2025
September 3rd to 7th, 2025
Various locations throughout the festival grounds
We requested approval for this experimental setup from the Austrian Data Protection Authority and the request was approved on July 28, 2025.