Triple Chaser: a short documentary that uses machine learning to document tear gas use against civilians, calling out "philanthropist" Warren Kanders for his company's war-crimes

Laura Poitras (previously) is the Academy Award-winning director of Citizenfour; she teamed up with the activist group Forensic Archicture (previously), whose incredible combination of data-visualization and documentary filmmaking have made them a potent force for holding war criminals and authoritarians to account: together, they created Triple Chaser, a short documentary that uses novel machine-learning techniques to document the ways in which tear gas and bullets made by companies belonging to "philanthropist" Warren Kanders have been used against civilians to suppress anti-authoritarian movements, and even to murder innocents, including children.

Kanders sat on the board of the Whitney Museum of Art, where Poitras had a one-woman show (I contributed to the program book); he is also owner of Safariland, which manufactures the ubiquitous Triple Chaser tear-gas cannisters (Kanders has resigned from the board after the production of this short film).

When Forensic Architecture was invited to contribute to the Whitney's biennale, they teamed up with Poitras to train a machine-learning system to recognize Triple Chaser cannisters in videos captured by protesters and journalists while they were under assault by security forces. They crowdsourced samples of the Triple Chaser cannisters, then created 3D models of them and placed them on a series of backgrounds to train their classifer. The video is narrated by David Byrne.

The resulting film -- which documents the production of the machine learning system and its use in identifying Triple Chaser products targeted at peaceful protesters, as well as Kanders' complicity in crimes (including the firing of live ammunition into the Occupied Territories in a massacre that killed many civilians, including children) and his connections to the Whitney -- was submitted to the Whitney for the biennale (to the Whitney's credit, they accepted the film). Read the rest