"(un)mask is a short film about the near future of affective labor. Cameras, owned by advertisers and the state, pervade physical space. Hypersensitive to facial expression data, corporations and government entities capture and exploit it, offering new modes of biopolitical control through a commodity we cannot help but give away.

A meditation on surveillance and sophisticated face-tracking technologies, (un)mask suggests that every facial expression is a valuable piece of data—affective labor that can be captured and analyzed to make inferences and recommendations, helping advertisers and government agencies algorithmically anticipate our actions and ever more deeply enmesh themselves in our daily lives.

(un)mask questions what avenues of resistance there are available to us, and suggests that by over-emoting and thus overflowing the databases of facial expression recognition data with a flood of affect, we can confuse those aiming to exploit this data and devalue it as a commodity."