Mass surveillance

These activists use makeup to defy mass surveillance

Anyone who happened to be loitering in the London borough of Greenwich on the evening of 16 January may have spotted a strange sight. Ten or so individuals, faces daubed in brightly painted patterns, winding their way in complete silence through rain-slicked streets, passing the borough’s sleek residential new-builds and empty redevelopment sites.

But this wasn’t some London-based subset of juggalos. This was the monthly outing of the Dazzle Club, a collective of artists using anti-facial recognition paint and choreographed walks to explore surveillance and public space in the 21st century. And I was along for the ride.

The Dazzle Club is a relatively new project, albeit one that’s already attracted an intense amount of interest, thanks to sitting at a particularly hot-button intersection of art, politics and activism. It’s a collaboration between two different collectives and formed by four founding artists, Emily Roderick, Georgina Rowlands, Anna Hart and Evie Price. As a duo, Emily and Georgina focus on performance-based work and curation questioning surveillance politics and cyber-feminist theory under the name Yoke Collective. Anna and Evie represent Air, a more sprawling group of artists who explore existence in the everyday and the concept of being ‘public’.