Workshops

Bring your face and curiosity.

Hands-on sessions where we test local face-recognition behaviour together. The goal is to fool machines, not people. The game is the least paint that still works, not the most.

How a session runs

1. The only tool you need is water-based face paint sold for children. A cheap kit is enough. Take more brushes than it comes with: in practice the darkest and lightest colours do most of the work.

A children's face-paint kit with brushes

2. Open the lab and save your face while it is still clean. That gives you an ID to test against.

The lab with a face detected, landmarks drawn, and the readout showing match 0.00 against a 0.58 threshold, recognised as ID zero — Saved. The readout now reads your distance from that baseline, against the 0.58 threshold. At rest it sits near zero.

3. Paint. Break the lines of the face. In workshops people usually pair up and paint each other.

Two participants painting each other's faces

4. Go back to the webcam. Success is either no face detected at all, or your ID marked "eluded".

The lab losing the detection box off the painted face — The detection square is no longer on the face. Screen from the first version of the lab.

5. Second check, no lab needed: any phone app with a face filter. If it asks you to find a face, you did it.

A phone camera app failing to find the painted face — The phone does not unlock either.

6. Now the actual problem. Heavy paint is easy, and a clown face is not a result anyone can use. Aim for the least paint that still works.

A heavily painted face — The developer, painted by a 12-year-old kid. The camouflage worked... but would you go out like this?

7. Share what worked. Contributions are ranked by how subtle they are, so a look that takes two lines is worth more here than one that takes a mask.

The lab upload screen: a recorded clip with its metadata, a note field for moderators, an unticked consent checkbox and a disabled submit button — Record a clip, add what you did, then consent. Nothing leaves the browser until that box is ticked, and the receipt code you get back is what deletes it later.

Run one where you are

This page cannot match hosts with facilitators yet. Until it can: if you can run a session, join the facilitators Signal group. If you want a workshop in your space, come back here, the matching is what this page is meant to grow into.

Facilitators Signal group, or scan:

QR code for the facilitators Signal group

Before running one, read the references archive for the state of the art.