Anthroptic is a collaboration between visual artist Ethan Ham and author Benjamin Rosenbaum. It consists of a set of stories that were inspired by photos from Flickr.com. Each photo is one in which a facial recognition software program sought to identify a face. Dial a telephone number and hear the stories they inspired as read by actors and the program itself. The project is on view at the PS 122 Gallery in New York City from October 13 - November 3rd, 2007.

Anthroptic, in its original form, was commissioned by The Present Group and built upon a project commissioned by Turbulence.org. The facial recognition library used in Anthroptic was kindly donated by Neurotechnologija. The software was set to allow for less accurate matches.

Thanks to the voice-actors: David Ackert (Vreeder and Tibor’s Wings), Hristo Atanasov (Sonia and Istvan and Ostrich), Sally Beaumont (The Gardeners of Rhododendrons and By the Gondola), Marlo Flanagan (the main phone greeting), Vanessa Carol Hart (Citizens and Istvan and Sonia), and AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech Demo (Prologue and Epilogue).

Also, thanks to all who helped realize this project, especially the photographers, each of whom kindly gave permission to use the photos. Most of the photographs are available under a Creative Commons license. For details about the photos’ licenses, or for more information about a photographer, click on the photographs’ titles to visit the photographers’ Flickr.com webpages.

The stories in Anthroptic were written by Benjamin Rosenbaum. The text is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.