Public - Volume 30, Issue 60, 2020

This is the introduction to the special issue on Biometrics: Mediating Bodies. It sets out the context of the study of biometrics and the manifold technologies, histories, applications, and concerns that make up biometric logics. It introduces readers to the five sections that make up the special issue: histories of measurement; politics and governance; aesthetics; narratives and experiences; and designs.

This paper aims to provide a historical context in which to appreciate the shared problems faced by social and computer scientists in using and creating biometric data. While historians of science are well aware of the trials (and errors) of previous attempts to quantify the human condition, this literature has not always made it into discussions of modern biometrics. Indeed, manuals for what are now called the computational social sciences often imagine that data mining and statistical averages are new, and that “Big Data” has only existed for the past decade. Such historical amnesia has led, this paper argues, to problems of modern bias emerging in the literature as a technical issue rather than a full-fledged conceptual barrier with long roots. Seen only in the light of present politics and practical concerns, I argue that these problems will remain intractable.

The Measure of Man—a guide for industrial designers, complete with scores of anthropometric data points—features hundreds, if not thousands, of meticulously calculated measurements of various human bodies. To the industrial designer, engineer, fabricator, CAD operator, drafter, or architect the aesthetic elements of Measure of Man and its descendents should seem familiar, as they use the same visual language as the engineering drawing or architectural blueprint. After reviewing the projects themselves, the standards which their aesthetic stylings mirror, and a number of historical antecedents, I will enact a Foucauldian discourse analysis, eventually arguing that projects such as the Human Design Manual implicate the normalized and classified human body in the construction of our built world, but they also reify the power held by those with the expertise in the standardized visual language of drafting and engineering.

When ICAO approved a new standard for international passports, they recommended including a high-resolution facial image on a chip in addition to the visual portrait on the identity page. Accordingly, there is, in a certain sense, two images in the current passport, one on the chip, the other visually displayed. In this article I relate the functional distribution between these two images to the nineteenth-century mugshot and argue that the photographically generated images in the current passport represent a subdued tension between two parallel paths in the history of photography: depiction and measurement. By looking at the arguments for facial recognition technologies in today's passport as specified by ICAO, I argue that the current regulation of international mobility downplays the importance of physical measurements and hides this behind photography’s more familiar function, namely depiction. This contributes to conceal biometrics as a tool for power and control in today’s society.

Looking at the work performed by infrastructures when they become part and parcel of the security governance, in this paper, I contend that a closer look must be paid to the infrastructural context of emergence and possibility of algorithms applied in “smart border technologies”. I focus on the explanatory and productive power of an analytical concept derived from the practice: the “security/mobility nexus”, which refers to the stitching of security to mobility to make governance possible. I illustrate how through the security/mobility nexus the Canadian State has capitalized on the promises of infrastructures–such as biometric algorithms–to innovate and deploy the affordance power of the digital to connect people’s data to spaces and physical sites. To analytically reflect on how it comes to mediate bodies as a “border infrastructure” with the security/mobility nexus, I first focus on the algorithmic mediation before turning to the biometric imaginary and its limits.

This paper considers the site of the modern airport as a space of biopower that facilitates and manages risk by subjecting Muslim travelers to more intense levels of scrutiny than others. I consider Canadian airports, in particular, as spaces that not only facilitate and perpetuate the production of racialized knowledges and practices of racial profiling against Canadian Muslims, but, moreover, as race-based, spatial enclosures that produce what I refer to as the ‘anxiety of stuckedness.’ Despite the rapid evolution of automated and biometric systems, which are now found in many airports across the globe, and are often touted as race-neutral technologies (Bigo 2006), I argue that the airport’s security and surveillance infrastructure attempt to conceal old and new logics of colonialism and governmentality within the invisibility of transnational databases, data flows and, increasingly, biometric systems.

This paper follows the mutual shaping of data records and citizens as data subjects to illustrate how precarious forms of citizenship emerge in the use of biometrics-based digital technologies for governance. It presents a case of using Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based unique identification project, in the delivery of welfare pensions to the elderly, widows, and the disabled in Rajasthan. In March 2016, pensions of about 757,000 beneficiaries were cancelled for a variety of reasons ranging from the beneficiary is “dead” or “duplicate” to other ineligibility criteria such as age or income. When Right to Information activists organized public hearings on these cancellations, they found many beneficiaries who were alive but declared “dead” on record. This paper explores this case of the “living dead” to conceptualize orphaning from information infrastructures as processes that render citizens residual in the mutual shaping of their lives with their data records.

This article examines contemporary biometric science against the backdrop of its development in nineteenth century eugenic and biostatistical practices, most notably the composite photography of Francis Galton. Focusing on automated face recognition, the article argues that contemorary biometric science is inextricable from its aesthetic investments, which in turn shape the ways in which faces and bodies are differentiated in identification systems. Based on a close reading of biometric engineering texts and projects, this aesthetico-scientific approach offers new ways of conceptualizing how biometrics constitutes rather than merely reflects bodies, and encodes racist, misogynist, and other social logics into the conception and design of technologies themselves. These are not biases that can be corrected, as ostensibly progressive biometric projects like IBM’s Diversity in Faces initiative suggest, but rather are inextricable from the biometric desire to render faces and bodies as transparent and machine-readable.

Research on biometrics pays much attention to a major biopolitics and often frames the subject as passive and powerless. Here, I trace a minor biopolitics—articulations of biopolitical resistance—within the aesthetic practice of artist and educator Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Expanding Hans Belting’s image theory with biopolitical theory, I argue that it is possible to trace two forms of resistance: 1. an aesthetic resistance which critically visualizes the otherwise invisible carrier medium and sub-perceptive level of biometric images (in this case DNA portraits) and 2. a bodily resistance which disrupts the biometric image by masking and manipulating its core sub-perceptive image actor: the DNA. By working across several aesthetic domains, Hagborg intervenes at multiple levels of the biopolitical visual economy (Väliaho), making it possible for a broad audience to perceive, engage with, and critically reflect upon biometric images and the ways in which they operate, organize, and affect society.

The face is a bodily surface that visually, historically and politically locates identity. Under the scrutiny of facial recognition and biometric software, the face can take the place of a whole identity, becoming a rigid singular representation. This paper draws connections between the increasing trends in surveillance and biometric technologies, and their manifestation within contemporary art practices. Specifically, I look to artworks that engage traditional portraiture and representations of the face, all the while manipulating expectations of the face-as-portrait. Artworks included in this project are Ursula Johnson’s L’nuweltik (We are Indian), Gillian Wearing’s Self Portrait at Twenty Seven Years Old and Anthony Cerniello’s Danielle. How has the face come to be represented in contemporary portraiture, and might these representations suggest a shifting logic of identity, away from the face? Art as visual expression is considered in relation to surveillance as another outcome of visual culture that highlights a continuing desire to categorize the subject within a social order.

This paper discusses design process and motivations of two interactive biometric data artworks (Digiti Sonus and Eyes). Narratives and artistic explorations using two forms of biometric data, from fingerprints and the iris, are discussed based on insights from various fields such as genetics, visual feature analysis, user interface design and data visualization and sonification. Digiti Sonus and Eyes extracted the unique visual features of each type of biometric data and transformed the data into musical sound with multimodal interactions so that the result was real time experimental sound. Various aspects of the two artworks are compared in this paper.

This essay aims to highlight how the current state of medical biometrics produces a transitional state of being between measurement and data recollection in which there no longer is an analogon for the self, how this is affecting our traditional image of the narrative self, and consequently how it directly impacts our very belief in a life-story.

abstract submitted in response to CFP for special issue “Biometrics”

This project emerges from a recent research-creation project involving MikuMikuDance (MMD), a freeware animation program where 3D models can be maneuvered, posed and choreographed into various dance sequences through the use of motion data and digital manipulation. In a dance translation that involves the choreography for Kate Bush’s song, “Wuthering Heights,” a Microsoft Kinect, and the freeware interface MikuMikuDance, created for Japanese virtual idol, Hatsune Miku, dance is revealed to be both rooted in the body and distributed across collective bodies and screens. By relinquishing biometric control, and allowing data to “dance,” this project eschews mimetic realism for an attempt to learn the machine’s “truth,” and proposes failure as a mode of resistance to systems of control, making way for an assemblage of relational bodies that dance within and through one another.

Mobile and wearable devices provide a range of new tools and approaches to measure the output metrics of the human body, especially in the medical and fitness realms. Cultural institutions similarly are drawing on a range of digital technologies to better understand the neural processes associated with visitor appreciation of artefacts. Harnessing data about how artworks and objects are experienced can be derived from measurable physical observations, such as an individual’s facial geometry, heartbeat, or retina movements. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salam, Massachusetts is used as a case study to explore the onsite quantification of the museum body. This example is placed in conversation with Google’s face match app, which uses computer vision to link user selfies with cultural collections. The discussion focuses on the evolution of a more quantified modality of cultural engagement, which places greater emphasis on the collection of data as an indicator of the quality of a museum visit.

This paper uses the film Looker (Michael Crichton, 1981) to highlight how a group of filmmakers and technologists imagined the sinister side of computer-automated biometrics would unfold in late twentieth century United States. The film depicts a scene in which a young female model gets her naked body scanned for a multinational corporation that will capitalize on the 3D computer model created from her likeness. An analysis of the body scanning scene and behind-the-scenes production processes raise new questions about the legacy of biometric imaginaries in the United States and helps us see in new ways how a set of concerns crystallized around the computerization of personal identifiable information, including physical bodies. While fears of computer automation existed in previous decades, by the early 1980s, the stakes heightened as biometric and photosensing technologies could sense and gather data computationally.

This paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing motion capture acting for film as a creative professional collaboration between actors and animators. Animators are framed as the draper (rathe than the drafter) of the synthespian’s digital costume, informed but not overdetermined by the raw data of the motion capture actor’s performance. Similarly, the data ensuing from the actor’s performance is analyzed in the neuroscientific terms of body image versus body schema, which makes a distinction between the self’s physical appearance and the self’s capacity for action. The paper concludes that ethnographic research on motion capture acting with this new terminology will provide a holistic view of the collective creative processes in digital cinematic production.

As a response to contemporary discourse that declaims the transformative potential of virtual reality (VR), I examine corporate discourse that literally and figuratively objectifies bodies, framing technological mediations as natural and necessary. I argue that these corporate ambitions for bodies in VR have physical, raced, gendered, and political implications, reproducing unequal relations while normalizing an understanding of bodies and worlds as commodifiable data.

A personal reflection on the press days of the 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff with a focus on the ecological messages in the French, Lithuanian, Ghanain and Canadian pavilions as well as the history of the Venice Biennale and the unique nationalist structure of the biennale.