Triple-Chaser

When US border agents fired tear gas grenades at civilians in November 2018, photographs showed that many of those grenades were manufactured by the Safariland Group, one of the world’s major manufacturers of so-called ‘less-lethal munitions’. The Safariland Group is owned by Warren B. Kanders, the vice chair of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Whereas the export of military equipment from the US is a matter of public record, the sale and export of tear gas is not. As a result, it is only when images of tear gas canisters appear online that monitoring organizations and the public can know where they have been sold, and who is using them.

But this kind of manual research is laborious, and time-consuming. Automating any part of that process could be hugely beneficial to human rights monitors, and the pursuit of corporate accountability in the global arms trade.

The task of training a computer vision classifier to identify a particular object usually requires thousands of images of that object. Images of the Triple-Chaser, however, are relatively rare.

To fill the gap, we constructed a digital model of the Triple-Chaser, and located it within thousands of photorealistic ‘synthetic’ environments, recreating the situations in which tear gas canisters are deployed and documented. In this way, ‘fake’ images help us to search for real ones, so that the next time Safariland munitions are used against civilians, we’ll know.

In partnership with Praxis Films, we presented the story of this research project as a video investigation, which premiered at the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

During the course of our research, we also exposed Kanders’ connection to the violence committed by the Israeli military against Palestinians in Gaza, through the US bullet manufacturer Sierra Bullets.

You can read our investigation into Sierra Bullets here.