Dazzles, Decoys, and Deities: The Janus Face of Anti-Facial Recognition Masks

摘要

Over the past few years a growing number of artists have critiqued the ubiquity of identity recognitiontechnologies. Specifically, the use of these technologies by state security programs, tech-giants andmultinational corporations has met with opposition and controversy. A popular form of resistance torecognition technology is sought in strategies of masking and camouflage. Zach Blas, Leo Selvaggio,Sterling Crispin and Adam Harvey are among a group of internationally acclaimed artists who havedeveloped subversive anti-facial recognition masks that disrupt identification technologies. This paperexamines the ontological underpinnings of these popular and widely exhibited mask projects. Over andagainst a binary understanding and criticism of identity recognition technology, I propose to take arelational turn to reimagine these technologies not as an object for our eyes, but as a relationship betweenliving organisms and things. A relational perspective cuts through dualist and anthropocentricconceptions of recognition technology opening pathways to intersectional forms of resistance andcritique. Moreover, if human-machine relationships are to be understood as coming into being in mutualdependency, if the boundaries between online and offline are always already blurred, if the human andthe machine live intertwined lives and it is no longer clear where the one stops and the other starts, weneed to revise our understanding of the self. A relational understanding of recognition technology movesaway from a notion of the self as an isolated and demarcated entity in favour of an understanding of theself as relationally connected, embedded and interdependent. This could alter the way we relate tomachines and multiplies the lines of flight we can take out of a culture of calculated settings.