“In the moonless dark, we saw an enormous quantity of fireflies forming groves of fire in the groves of bushes, and we envied them because they loved each other, because they sought each other out in their amorous flights and lights.

(...)

From there, we could see very clearly two spotlights far away, very fierce, mechanical eyes from which it was impossible to escape, and then we were seized by the terror of being discovered.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Letter to Franco Farolfi, January 1941

 

A few months before his death, Pier Paolo Pasolini's “Disappearance of the Fireflies” summoned up a bygone era: the ballet of glowworms that lit up the dark nights of the Italian countryside. He parallels the environmental pollution that threatens the Living with the political changes that provoke it — at a time particularly marked by the arrival of fascism to power in Europe.

For Pasolini, fireflies are the allegory of beauty in the world, the possibility of love. For him, they are a form of resistance. Faced with the advent of fascism, the consumer society and the society of the spectacle, he laments their disappearance — both literally (as their populations are decimated by light and atmospheric pollution) and metaphorically; in these dark times when beauty, love and resistance seem to be on the verge of extinction.

Fifty years on, the presence and influence of images and screens in our lives are ever more powerful — the society of spectacle having become intrinsically intertwined with that of (over)consumption. While image technologies often facilitate our daily lives, they sometimes reinforce discrimination and abuse of power — notably through facial recognition systems. Images and artificial intelligence can then become tools leading to situations of danger and violence, particularly for certain categories of people.

FIREFLIES IN THE ALGORITHM is a collaboration between Elsa Leydier and Cap_able, an Italian brand that has developed clothing to divert the attention of facial recognition software. Thanks to patterns designed by artificial intelligence, the garments are perceived by surveillance devices as animals, thus avoiding the collection of the wearer's biometric data.

Cap_able's pieces raise awareness of the abuses of technological devices, but also offer a way of protecting oneself against them. Fashion becomes resistance.

In FIREFLIES IN THE ALGORITHM, fireflies emerge from our image devices, rediscovering Pasolini's lost hope.

Elsa Leydier drew inspiration from the principles of political and resistant clothing to create a set of images echoing the values and mechanisms put in place by the brand.

By interweaving several types of imagery (stills from surveillance camera videos, digital photographs, Polaroid photographs, photocopies, scans...), Leydier recalls the jacquard technique, which enables weaving using threads of several different colors, used to create Cap_able pieces.

The images in FIREFLIES IN THE ALGORITHM thus exist individually, but also as a grid of thirty square-format images, forming a single image when arranged on an Instagram feed. The work's two simultaneous layers of perception echo the two levels offered in the photographed pieces: that of facial recognition software, which sees a certain piece of information, and that understood by the human eye, which sees something else.

Finally, in the same way that Cap_able insists on always giving its users a choice (the pieces are reversible, with one side fooling facial recognition and the other not), FIREFLIES IN THE ALGORITHM is about playing the game and following the codes of the algorithms, inserting itself into the flow of images on social networks, while at the same time infiltrating resistance and bugs into the system.
 

FIREFLIES IN THE ALGORITHM presents a political fashion that can sometimes save us, but also allows us to let our guard down when we can. It's a resilient fashion that unfurls among the images of our daily lives, repopulating our screens with fireflies.