Designer Simon Weckert's 'Digital Camouflage' Shirt Hides Wearers from AI Surveillance Cameras in Berlin

A Berlin designer has built a colourful shirt that makes the wearer invisible — not to the human eye, but to the AI cameras now watching one of the city's busiest intersections.

Simon Weckert's "Digital Camouflage" shirt uses bright colours and dense patterns to confuse AI-powered object-detection systems, the software that scans video feeds and labels what it sees: a car, a bicycle, a person. When someone wears the shirt, the system fails to recognise them as a person at all. Weckert developed the pattern using AI itself, running through an "adversarial loop" — a cycle of trial and error in which each iteration of the design was tested against the detection system and refined until it consistently broke recognition (Dezeen).

The shirt was built as a direct response to a new pilot project from Berlin police. In August 2026, the force launched AI-supported video surveillance at Kottbusser Tor, a busy traffic and transport hub in the Kreuzberg district that authorities classify as a Kriminalitätsschwerpunkt — a designated crime hotspot (Tagesschau). The pilot also covers other crime-heavy locations including Warschauer Straße, according to the Berlin public broadcaster RBB24. The cameras themselves are manufactured by a private company (taz).

This is not Weckert's first confrontation with the systems that shape everyday digital life. His own website describes him as a "modern-day digital wizard and mischievous tinkerer." His past projects include "Google Maps Hacks," which probes apps that interface with Google Maps and examines the new forms of digital capitalism they create, and "Machine Unlearning for Artists," in which he hacks AI systems to challenge the conventions of the technology and spark conversations about its ethical and cultural dimensions (Simon Weckert).

The "Digital Camouflage" shirt sits squarely in that tradition. It is a piece of clothing and a provocation at once. The pattern works by exploiting the way object-detection models process visual information: the colours and shapes interfere with the features the system has learned to associate with a human figure, so the software simply does not flag the wearer as a person.

Berlin's pilot at Kottbusser Tor began in August 2026, and Weckert's response arrived the same month. The shirt raises an immediate practical question for the police and the private firm supplying the cameras: if a brightly coloured garment can defeat the system, how robust is the system? Weckert has not said how widely the shirt will be produced or sold, and there is no indication yet of how Berlin police have responded to it.

For now, the "Digital Camouflage" shirt exists as a wearable reminder that the tools watching public spaces have blind spots — and that someone has already found them.