Essay
Exploding biometrics
Zach Blas and the art of defacement
von Nace Zavrl
Erschienen in: double 38: Face-Off – Politiken von Gesicht und Maske (11/2018)
Assoziationen: Europa Debatte Wissenschaft
“The people are still powerless, but now they’re aware,” announced surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden in a June 4, 2018 interview for The Guardian.1 Reflecting upon his revelations five years after their appearance, Snowden displays a measure of confidence, hope, and genuine satisfaction: “look back before 2013 and look at what has happened since,” he states; “everything changed.”2 Disregarding the pompous phrasing, his overall assessment stands: the NSA and GCHQ global wiretapping disclosures mark a watershed moment in our understandings of the early twenty-first century, a period so often classified under rubrics of the ‘information age’ or ‘digital economy’, but that rather more closely corresponds to notions of worldwide mass surveillance.
Recent decades have seen a massive proliferation in technologies of capture, with human corporeal features – faces, fingerprints, as well as irises and molecular tissue – emerging as exceptionally fertile sites of collection, recognition, and biometric control. On a level unprecedented in history, body parts have become knowable, transparent, and algorithmically mappable surfaces. Be it through passport photography or clandestine CCTV cameras, facial contours are constantly observed, inspected, and mathematically scrutinized so as to supply complete documentation of their subject. “Romantic notions of the face as primarily qualitative,”...
