Surveilling Politicians, Unmasking Influencers, Fake Likes and Dying Together
This talk takes you inside the technical and creative process behind projects that have made international headlines by exploiting publicly accessible infrastructure.
"The Flemish Scrollers" runs real time computer vision on government livestreams to detect and publicly tag politicians scrolling their phones during parliamentary sessions. "The Follower" combines open CCTV feeds with AI to match Instagram posts to the exact surveillance footage of the moment they were taken, proving how traceable our curated online lives really are. "Die With Me" is a chat app that only works when your phone battery drops below 5 percent, a viral experiment in digital scarcity.
In the the talk we have a live demo: a custom Python tool manufacturing fake likes on a post in real time on stage, showing how cheap and trivial it is to break the trust system social media is built on.
This is surveillance research from outside the security industry. No corporate constraints, no responsible disclosure timelines.
Dries Depoorter is a Belgian artist and creative technologist based in Ghent. He builds systems that exploit the gaps between surveillance infrastructure, AI, and public trust, turning openly available data streams (public cameras, social media APIs, parliamentary livestreams) into installations that function as both art and proof of concept exploits. With a background in electronics and computer vision, he works across Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ESP32, and custom PCB design. He has spoken at DEF CON Singapore, MoMA, SXSW, and TEDx, and has exhibited at the Barbican, Art Basel, Ars Electronica, and ZKM.
Dries Depoorter is a Belgian artist and creative technologist who builds systems that exploit the gaps between surveillance infrastructure, AI, and public trust. His work turns openly available data streams, public cameras, social media APIs, parliamentary livestreams, into tools that expose how little privacy actually exists. His project "The Flemish Scrollers" uses real-time computer vision on government livestreams to detect and publicly tag politicians scrolling their phones during parliamentary sessions. "The Follower" combines open CCTV feeds with AI to match Instagram posts to the exact surveillance footage of the moment they were taken, proving how traceable our "curated" online lives really are. "Die With Me," a chat app that only works below 5% battery, became a viral experiment in digital scarcity and human behavior under constraint. With a background in electronics, computer vision, and hardware prototyping, Dries works across Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ESP32, and custom PCB design to build installations that function as both art and proof-of-concept exploits. He has exhibited at the Barbican, Art Basel, Ars Electronica, and ZKM, and has spoken at SXSW, MoMA, and TEDx.