Mil Ojos
No one can remember every face. Every day, hundreds of faces of missing people circulate in Mexico on posters, screens and feeds. A face seen for three seconds is lost at the next corner. It is not a moral failure: it is a limit of the body.
The work
Mil Ojos is an exoskeleton with nine cameras mounted on servo-driven arms around the wearer's head. Each camera moves on its own, turns and follows what it sees, while an artificial intelligence system compares nearby faces in real time with a registry of missing people.
The piece is a prosthesis for that limit: an extended memory and an expanded body, an organ of search that never tires, looks away or forgets. It speaks of collective grief, affective surveillance and the weight of holding social memory. Here, technology inhabits the body not as a weapon, but as an organ of search.
How it works
- 01Search
Each arm turns on two axes to follow the faces that enter its field of view.
- 02Capture
The camera detects a face and turns it into a 512-dimension vector with InsightFace.
- 03Compare
The vector is matched by cosine similarity against a local database of 11,375 missing-person records.
- 04Insist
It never stops: it looks again, and compares again.
It identifies no one.
The highest similarity recorded in testing ranges from 30 to 36%, far from a match. That is an honest specification, not the thesis of the work: the piece doesn't solve the search, it sustains it.
Everything runs on a computer carried with the piece, with no internet connection and no images of the public stored.
MIL OJOS_
The search system. The same facial-similarity search the piece uses, open on the web, over the State of Mexico's missing-person records (COBUPEM). The interface is in Spanish.
Details
- Year2026
- MaterialsWood and steel, nine articulated arms, nine USB cameras, 36 servomotors, UTP cabling, laptop with a local database
- Dimensions80 × 80 × 75 cm, 5 kg
- TechnologyComputer vision, InsightFace, servomotors, Python
- SupportJóvenes Creadores 2025–2026, Mexico's national system of support for artistic creation (SACPC)
Exhibitions
- Sensitive Fibers, Nobel Peace Laureates World Summit, Rome2–4 dic 2026
- Arte en Movimiento, Centro Cultural Clavijero, Morelia, Mexico19–22 nov 2026
- Master class Mil Ojos, MA in Digital Art and New Media, Tec de Monterrey, online29 oct 2026 · Zoom ↗
- Proceso abierto, DigiLab MUTEK MX, Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City28 oct 2026 · CCD ↗