Public 60: Biometrics

60

BIOMETRICS MEDIATING BODIES

edited by ALEKSANDRA KAMINSKA and DAVID GRONDIN

PUBLIC 60

BIOMETRICS: MEDIATING BODIES

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INTRODUCTION Aleksandra Kaminska and David Grondin

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APPROACHES TO BIOMETRICS IN EXPERIMENTAL SOUND ART Towards a Posthuman Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response Erin Gee and Frédérick Garcia

— 1. HISTORIES OF MEASUREMENT 20

WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BIASED Measuring the Human Body from Anthropometry to the Computational Social Sciences Kevin Donnelly

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THE DRAFTED BODY Gabi Schaffzin

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PHOTOGRAPHIC PASSPORT BIOMETRY Liv Hausken

— 2. POLITICS & GOVERNANCE 62

BIOMETRIC ALGORITHMS AS BORDER INFRASTRUCTURES Mediation, the Security/Mobility Nexus, and the Smart Borders Discourse David Grondin

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THE CARCERAL AIRPORT Managing Race as Risk through Biometric Systems and Technologies Constantine Gidaris

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“THE LIVING DEAD” Orphaning in Aadhaar-Enabled Distribution of Welfare Pensions in Rajasthan Ranjit Singh

— 3. AESTHETICS 108 BIOMETRIC AESTHETICS Towards a Critical Theory of the Biometric Body Robert Heynen 126 BIOMETRICS AND ITS RESISTENCE Lea Laura Michelsen 142 A GLUT OF FACES Investigating the Resonance of Biometric Technologies in Contemporary Portraiture Kristina Fiedrich 156 DIGITI SONUS and EYES Biometric Data Arts Using Fingerprint and Iris Data Yoon Chung Han

— 4. NARRATIVES & EXPERIENCES 166 HEALTH BIOMETRICS AND THE NARRATIVE SELF Daniel Laforest 175 THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE Biometric Data, Medical Imaging, and Embodied Narrative Rachel Conrad Bracken 188 ANIMATING THE KINETIC TRACE Kate Bush, Hatsune Miku, and Posthuman Dance Hilary Bergen 208 THE QUANTIFIED AND CUSTOMISED MUSEUM Measuring, Matching, and Aggregating Audiences Caroline Wilson-Barnao

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5. DESIGN

222 BEFORE BODY SCANNING THERE WAS LOOKER Building the Proto-Digital Hollywood Actor circa 1981 Alana Staiti 236 DIGITAL DRAPERY AND BODY SCHEMA-TICS Collaborative Authorship in Motion Capture Performance Dan Leberg 250 VIRTUAL BODIES INC. Framing Corporate Mediations of Bodies in VR Daniel Harley

— CHRONICLES 262 EXTRAVAGANT FRAGILITY Sea, Mud, Sand, and Perfume at the Venice Biennale Ella Tetrault 271 DISENCHANTMENT Marc Mayer

— REVIEWS 275 Marnie Ellen Hertzler, Hi I Need To Be Loved Irene Achterbergh 278 Beads they’re sewn so tight Adrienne Huard 282 Candace Hicks, Many Mini Murder Scenes Inbal Newman 285 Manuel DeLanda: ISM ISM, edited by John Klacsmann and Andrew Lampert Clint Enns 288 Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums, Kirsty Robertson Shahbaz Khayambashi 291 CONTRIBUTORS

INTRODUCTION ALEKSANDRA KAMINSKA AND DAVID GRONDIN

When I was a youth, I knew an old Frenchman who had been a prison-keeper for thirty years, and he told me that there was one thing about a person which never changed, from the cradle to the grave—the lines in the ball of the thumb; and he said that these lines were never exactly alike in the thumbs of any two human beings.

—From “A Thumb-Print and What Came of It,” in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, 1883.

When Mark Twain used fingerprints as a narrative device meant to help in the identification of a culprit in his 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, he was at the vanguard of using biometrics as scientific and legal proof. Even though Sir William James Herschel, while he was Chief Magistrate of a district in India, had already used palm prints and fingerprints in 1858 on a contract with a Mr. Konai, his idea took time to catch on and be adopted widely across the world. And so Twain, writing almost forty years later, was still explaining how prints could be used as identifying marks. At first, Herschel’s prints had been intended less as means for identification than as a kind of binding gesture that would feel more personal than a signature. This original use of the fingerprint has a perhaps more superstitious role than one predicated on scientific evidence, a reminder that what we today call “biometrics” is in fact a new way of talking about something people have done in various ways, often intuitively more than explicitly, for a long time.

Indeed, superstitions based on the dimensions of the body and its various parts and features have a long and colourful history. From projecting how long someone might live based on the length of the “life line” on their palm, to attempts to determine personality traits based on features like the shape of the nose or the chin, to any number of popular tales connecting physical attributes to personality or future (mis)fortunes, all of these evoke the idea behind biometrics whereby bodies are transformed and reduced into data. While we tend to consider such examples as folklore, myth, or stereotype rather than science, they are still features through which we try to make sense of a person, looking for meaning in the quantified and measured body. These are not so much attempts to identify the individual as they are a means to assess, in a very loose way, where someone belongs and where their future might take them. This interpretation is thus largely geared toward prediction or projection so that, at least implicitly, the body can be understood as that which determines, foreshadows, or somehow already knows—or is written by—a life’s journey and trajectory: the biometric and the narrative are here constituted and imagined through one another.

This kind of logic is the same that, many years later, would result in the main criticisms of the practices of anthropometry and eugenics, where biometrics became a way to ascertain a person’s traits and, more significantly, of turning superstition into codified discrimination and formalized

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prediction. The body would become invoked to argue for everything from a race’s moral fitness to an individual’s criminal predisposition, examples that remind us of the very problematic and dangerous misappropriations of body data. Such associative leaps are still cause for concern as new ways to measure the body, through systems such as those for facial or vocal recognition, have also been shown to make and use racist, sexist, and gendered algorithms, thus skewing the analysis and making certain bodies more or less legible.

In an effort to understand and control the deployment of biometrics today, it is worth remembering the origin of anthropometry in the nineteenth century as proposed by the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon. In his vision, anthropometry would be a tool to improve the ways police bureaus filed information on known criminals. At the time, files were ordered by last name—an ineffective strategy that exacerbated the problem of tracking recidivists—so that lawbreakers could easily give false names upon each visit at the station. Rather, while working as a clerk in such a police station, Bertillon suggested a method for organizing information according to body measurements.1 By identifying criminals through their body rather than their name, the legal system was finally able to keep track of repeat offenders. While Bertillon’s measurement system relied on a very detailed series of rigourous steps, the careless implementation of his techniques led to galling misuse and misunderstanding, transforming what was meant as an organizational tool into a way of “predicting” who would become criminal. Ultimately, the criminal history of anthropometry and biometrics raises one of the classic questions regarding the meaning of the measured body: is this data meant to merely identify a body, or does it indeed tell us anything about the person in that body?

As the body’s data came to be understood as a unique way to identify individuals, biometrics became tightly associated, as it is today, with the work of identification and recognition. As a result, biometrics is now regularly used in practices of surveillance, monitoring, observing, and various other forms of looking and seeing, functioning as part of the legal and bureaucratic structures of the state, its institutions, and their systems for keeping track of citizens as bodies—particularly as bodies that are on the move. This visual emphasis can perhaps be broadly attributed to our oculocentric culture, which is apparent in the prevalence of research focused on facial biometrics. To capture the datainformed knowledge that govern and constantly track our lives, David Beer speaks of a “data gaze” that acts as a powerful analytic to “how lives are viewed differently through data,” hence showing “how the visual, the optic and the material are privileged in the knowledge that forms around data analytics.”2 Indeed, biometrics readily brings in a whole plethora of data that can be used and mobilized for identification and self-monitoring purposes. For instance, sleep patterns provide a different way to think about what our data says about us, related to the temporal rhythms and cycles of our body, perhaps even suggesting something about our overall health. Biometrics in this sense is a generic term referring to the body’s datafication with varied and far-reaching consequences, helping us at once better understand ourselves but also making us legible, recognizable, and at times even comprehensible (knowable and known) to both the machine and the other. On the one hand, then, a response to this biometric surveillance has been the emergence of various modes of resistance meant to deflect the eye of the data gaze, including techniques and crafty designs that make the body illegible and, hence, unidentifiable. For example, camouflaging the face using geometric shapes (with objects or paint) is a defacement tactic that makes facial patterns unrecognizable and has been shown to confuse cameras.3

8 PUBLIC 60 KAMINSKA + GRONDIN

First fingerprints taken 1859-60 by William James Herschel (1833-1917). Public domain.

On the other hand, despite the concern for privacy and control around the use of biometrics, we are using these systems daily to make our lives more expeditious, healthy, and convenient, and to become optimized versions of our selves. These activities reveal a paradox surrounding biometric technologies today: at the same time as we object to having our datafied body read through invasive practices of identification and surveillance, we also willingly participate and benefit from being characterized and rendered biometrically. From having our voices recognized by our devices to unlocking phones with our fingers or our irises; from Fitbit trackers making sure our hearts are beating “appropriately” as we jog to insulin patches measuring our sugar levels; from participating in interactive art installations that use our heartbeat or capture our fingerprint—we are active consumers and users of technologies that are able to recognize us individually and to give us specific readings on the state or condition of our bodies.

At this cross-section of the ideological and the quotidian, the biometric body faces the pressures of optimization, but also of normalization, standardization, and perfectionism. Measurements are the fuel for comparison, something Australian artist Lucy McCrae critiques in her work Biometric Mirror.4 In this immersive installation, the visitor looks at their face as the artificial intelligence spits out an attractiveness score and set of character traits. As part of a larger series of events at the Science Gallery Melbourne called PERFECTION, the project draws our attention to inherent flaws in the quantification and programming of algorithmic encodings of subjective ideas—such as the way we,

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and AI, define and “assess” beauty. The standards of the human body are also reflected back to us as we use them for the creation of models, avatars, robots, simulations, and other cinematographic, virtual, or computational bodies. A number of such cases, which engage with the mediation of the body into digital protocols, are explored throughout this issue, and particularly in the final section on “Design.”

FIVE SECTIONS

This issue of PUBLIC includes seventeen contributions that works across these many dimensions of biometrics, which we have organized into five sections. The first two sections—“Histories of Measurement” and “Politics and Governance”—set the historical context for prior attempts to measure bodies and use markers as ways of sorting out bodies, leading to closer looks at how biometric data and technologies have been designed to serve surveillance and border management purposes in our contemporary era. The last three sections on “Aesthetics,” “Narratives and Experiences,” and “Design” focus on how body data becomes integrated into our world and our practices in both critical and useful ways, how this changes the way we can “be read” and communicate with machines and systems, and how such experiences change the way we think about the self.

The first section on “Histories of Measurement” begins with Kevin Donnelly’s “We Have Always Been Biased,” in which he lays out a formidable case for how difficult it has become to resist modern statistical bias in any deployment of biometrics. To convey the problematic ways that biometric data is used and understood today, he brings us back to the history of anthropometry to highlight the legacy of racialized thinking in the development of modern statistics. Leading us to what is now known as computational social sciences, he exposes the impossible work of social scientists “to eliminate bias in statistics without eliminating statistics.”5 In the subsequent article of this section, Gabi Schaffzin delves into the “drafted body” as drawn in different anthropometric projects, which portray the body in conventional illustrations used by industrial engineers, designers, and architects.

Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, he takes on Henry Dreyfuss’s Measure of Man diagrams to expose how power (through standardization) is inscribed in the construction and dissemination of the drafted anthropometric diagrams. He aptly shows how these diagrams are “statistically exclusionary,” since they “cannot describe many millions of bodies,”6 exposing their authoritative effect as a “universal language” and international standard “understood by everyone regardless of race or nationality.”7 In the last piece of the section, Liv Hausken looks at another international standard and common rendering of biometrics as applied in a single document: the passport. She asserts that the requirement for global interoperability of the biometric tool in facial recognition technology that is crafted onto the passport hides how photography is both depiction and measurement (detection). Focusing on a history of photography as a measuring instrument, she points out how the photographically generated biometric data of the international passport photo is reminiscent of the classic mugshot metric portrait and profile view developed by Bertillon.

After these historical inroads, the second section emphasizes the “Politics and Governance” of biometric technologies. First, in an analytical essay aiming to understand the role of biometrics in the North American border security context as well as the politics of their insertion, David Grondin questions how biometric algorithms come to serve as automated border infrastructures slowly removing the input of human agents at the border, thus highlighting smart borders as technology

10 PUBLIC 60 KAMINSKA + GRONDIN

mediating the border-as-infrastructure. Then, Constantine Gidaris applies this logic more specifically in the rise of biometric systems at Canadian airports by foregrounding how it leaves the physical body to be surveilled in a datafied form. This significantly hinders the mobility of individuals along racial lines and biases, particularly Muslims in the Canadian case. Finally, the last contribution of the section deals more directly with governance through biometric databases and is owed to Ranjit Singh. It addresses India’s biometrics-based national identification infrastructure—Aadhaar—which was to be used to distribute social welfare. Singh focuses on the problems inherited from the digital mediations of citizens’ relationship with the state through their management of data records. In effect, as the data practices of the biometric system turned these citizens into data subjects, some were deemed to be “living dead subjects” as a result of being assigned to residual categories of “duplicates” or “dead” because of wrongly entered data. This article puts forth the ominous and ill-conceived management of a projected seamless biometric system.8 Section three on “Aesthetics” highlights these critical approaches and demonstrates the ongoing importance of artists as interlocutors of new technologies and, in this case, of the mass implementation of what have quickly become intrusive technologies. Robert Heynen’s “Biometric Aesthetics” focuses on automated face recognition to expose the “aesthetic-scientific conjuncture” at the heart of biometric identification.9 Drawing on contemporary art, the history of biometrics—both as a social engineering project and identification practice—as well as on scientific textbooks, Heynen argues for a biometric science that is inextricable from aesthetics and yet reflects but also constitutes normative bodies. In “Biometrics and its Resistance,” Lea Laura Michelsen examines the possibilities of biopolitical resistance through the work of American artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg. She proposes that the artist, who works with DNA phenotyping, contributes to many levels of a biopolitical visual economy and creates works that allow for critical reflections on the way biometric imaging circulates in society.

Kristina Fiedrich continues our examination of the face in “A Glut of Faces,” and turns to contemporary artworks by artists such as Ursula Johnson, Gillian Wearing, and Anthony Cerniello.

She argues that biometric technologies of surveillance are transforming portraiture in contemporary art, and that in turn the shifting representations of the face also reflect shifting logics of identity. To close the section is a project by Yoon Chung Han: her Digi Sonus and Eyes are interactive biometric data artworks that offer a way of educating varied publics on biometric technologies. Installed in a museum, the works use visitors’ fingerprints and iris information though multimodal interactions that transform visual data into musical sound.

The relationship between the body that is quantified and one that is defined by experiences outside or beyond the parameters of the measurable is the theme of the fourth section: “Narratives and Experiences.” Daniel Laforest’s “Health Biometrics and the Narrative Self ” is a self-reflexive contribution on how the biomedical instruments that measure our physical and physiological performance in turn change the way we tell our life story. Similar themes run through “The Ghost in the Machine” by Rachel Conrad Bracken, which provides a reading of Mike McCormac’s postmodern sci-fi novel, Notes from a Coma (2005). Working from the liminal setting of the coma, the novel provides a probing reflection of the self as it hovers between life and death, “inviting us to question what can and cannot be revealed by either biometric or narrative accounts of body, mind, or identity.”10 Moving away from the biomedical sphere to offer additional settings for thinking about the intersections between data and narration, the next two articles focus on biometric data monitoring

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and possibilities in two distinctive activities: posthuman dance and the experiential museum visit.

Hilary Bergen’s “Animating the Kinetic Trace” revolves around a research-creation project that produced a choreography for the Japanese virtual idol Hatsune Miku. Using motion data and digital manipulation, there is “a trace of the human dancer in the code”11 so that, along the way, dance becomes understood as both of the body and a distributed assemblage of relational bodies that together resist biometric control. Closing out the section, in “The Quantified and Customized Museum” Caroline Wilson-Barnao situates the body in exhibition space by explaining how biometric data such as facial geometry, heartbeat, or retina movements are used to better analyze audience engagement with artefacts, and how to adapt curatorial approaches accordingly. The case explored here is based on a face matching app that connects artefacts in the museum with user selfies.

Alana Staiti starts the final section—“Design”—with “Before Body Scanning There Was Looker,” a close reading of a body scanning scene from the 1981 Michael Crichton film along with behindthe-scenes production processes, to consider the imaginaries and legacies of biometric technologies.

Dan Leberg also works from film as a site through which to consider the transformation of the body into digital information. In “Digital Drapery and Body Schema-tics,” he offers a theoretical consideration of motion capture performance for digital cinema. If the actor as data is both physical appearance and potential for action, Leberg suggests, the performance must be understood as a creative collaboration between an actor and their animator. To wrap up the discussion on how the body is mediated into digital worlds, Daniel Harley extends this discussion in “Virtual Bodies Inc.” with a critical view of the way VR works as a corporate apparatus that commodifies bodies, reproduce inequalities, and normalizes visualizing technologies. *

*

*

It would be impossible to provide a comprehensive assessment of biometric use today. As the cover of the issue seeks to point out, the concept can be stretched and extended to expand the way we think the technological mediation of bodies. A collaboration between artist Erin Gee and scientist Frédérick Garcia, the cover is inspired by the popular phenomenon of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), in which the human body is physiologically triggered by sounds. But this “body” does not necessarily need to be human, and the duo is investigating how the same principles affect other forms of life, specifically plants. Indeed, the particular constitution (or “metrics”) of different plant tissues modulates how the plant will react to sound waves, stimulating measurable responses such as increased growth rate or movement. Ultimately, even in this unusual instance, biometrics can still be used to identify and classify species and to track and monitor responses.

The objective of this special issue of PUBLIC is to offer a snapshot of the manifold technologies, histories, applications, and concerns that make up biometric logics. While biometrics has been around in some form or another for quite some time, as Donnelly argues, the fact remains that what is today commonly construed as biometrics—if one means the machine recognition and identification of bodies—has only recently been a fact of life. While to some extent readers will be affected by, or subjected to, biometrics in different ways, these are technologies that at the very least are controversial and urgent points of political and public debate, notably in areas such as border security and migration control or surveillance police profiling. As the contributors articulate, biometric technologies are not

12 PUBLIC 60 KAMINSKA + GRONDIN

in and of themselves positive or problematic: they become so through the ways they are used and how they treat and transforms us as citizens or patients of the machine/state and as publics, consumers, creators, and audiences living lives, having experiences, and moving through places. What is common among these many applications is the reduction and mediation of the body and of identity through measurement, but what we hope resonates is an idea of biometrics that is complicated—one that, as the five sections highlight, pits issues of surveillance and privacy side by side with those of interactivity, engagement, and personalization. Our goal is to produce an issue that will help readers form an opinion about the extent to which the biometric affects all of us daily, and how it could and should be used for governance purposes, while also tuning into biometrics as part of longer sociotechnical histories, and as technologies that can be mobilized, experienced, and resisted, including through aesthetic and artistic engagement.

A special thank you for assisting us in the production of the issue to François Zaidan, Shawn Newman, and Jennifer de Freitas, and to Erin Gee and Frédérick Garcia for the unexpected cover.

Additional funding for this issue is provided through grants from the FRQSC and SSHRC, held by the editors.

NOTES 1 Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Investigation. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

2 David Beer, The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2019), 8-9.

3 Torin Monahan, “The Right to Hide? Anti-Surveillance Camouflage and the Aestheticization of Resistance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12.2 (2015): 159-178.

4 Lucy McCrae, “Biometric Mirror,” artist website. Accessed 12 December 2019. https://www.lucymcrae.net/ biometric-mirror-.

5 Kevin Donnelly, in this issue, 30.

6 Gabi Schaffzin, in this issue, 41.

7 Ibid., 43.

8 Ranjit Singh, in this issue, 92.

9 Robert Heynen, in this issue, 109.

10 Rachel Conrad Bracken, in this issue, 175.

11 Hilary Bergen, in this issue, 194.

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PUBLIC 60 Editors for PUBLIC 60: Aleksandra Kaminska and David Grondin Editorial Assistant: François Zaidan Managing Editor: Shawn Newman Art Reviews Editor: Jim Drobnick Book Reviews Editor: Sara Swain Copy Editor: Claudia Sicondolfo Design: Jennifer de Freitas, Associés Libres Printed in Canada by Friesens PUBLIC EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE Patricio Dávila, OCAD University Christine Davis, New York Jim Drobnick, OCAD University Sylvie Fortin, New York Saara Liinamaa, University of Guelph Susan Lord, Queen’s University Janine Marchessault, York University Joel Ong, York University PUBLIC EDITORIAL BOARD Ariella Azoulay, Bar Ilan University Ian Balfour, York University Bruce Barber, NSCAD University Vikki Bell, Goldsmiths, University of London Simon Critchley, The New School Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, London Michael Darroch, University of Windsor Maria Fusco, Edinburgh College of Art Monika Kin Gagnon, Concordia University Peggy Gale, Toronto John Greyson, York University Gareth James, University of British Columbia Michelle Kasprzak, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute Nina Möntmann, The Royal Institute of Art Kirsty Robertson, University of Western Ontario Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne Karyn Sandlos, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Johanne Sloan, Concordia University Imre Szeman, University of Alberta Dot Tuer, OCAD University PUBLIC ACCESS ADVISORY BOARD Ron Burnett, Emily Carr University of Art + Design Dick Hebdige, University of California, Santa Barbara Arthur Kroker, University of Victoria Chip Lord, University of California, Santa Cruz Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda, Havana Kaja Silverman, University of Pennsylvania Michael Snow, Toronto Aneta Szylak, Wyspa Institute of Art Peter Weibel, ZKM Akram Zaatari, Beirut

COVER: Image by Erin Gee and Frédérick Garcia.

See p. 14

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PUBLIC 60

BIOMETRICS: MEDIATING BODIES Edited by Aleksandra Kaminska and David Grondin This issue of PUBLIC maps out some of the ways that bodies have

CONTRIBUTORS

been measured and identified based on biometrics ever since the

HILARY BERGEN

rise of media technologies, from nineteenth century anthro-

RACHEL CONRAD BRACKEN

pometry to modern day computational science. From case studies

KEVIN DONNELLY

and interventions detailing the history and politics of biometrics,

KRISTINA FIEDRICH

to creative and critical applications and visualizations of the

FRÉDÉRICK GARCIA

biometric body, the authors and artists included here work

ERIN GEE

across diverse theoretical approaches and disciplinary traditions

CONSTANTINE GIDARIS

to engage the machine-readable body. The contributions are

DAVID GRONDIN

organized around five conversations—Histories of Measurement;

YOON CHUNG HAN

Politics and Governance; Aesthetics; Narratives and Experiences;

DANIEL HARLEY

and Design—that reflect the reach of biometrics today. On the one

LIV HAUSKEN

hand, they consider the quantified and objectified body as it

ROBERT HEYNEN

becomes part of systems of identification and recognition, such as

DANIEL LAFOREST

in contexts of security or surveillance. On the other, they highlight

DAN LEBERG

the new narratives, aesthetics, and experiential mediations of

LEA LAURA MICHELSEN

the body that surface in fields like health, cinema, media art, and

GABI SCHAFFZIN

curation. Along the way, these articles take on biometric technolo-

RANJIT SINGH

gies through a variety of questions and angles, including those of

ALANA STAITI

standardization and normalization, identification, infrastructures,

CAROLINE WILSON-BARNAO

verification protocols, and algorithmic methods, but also perspectives centered on the representations, renderings, imaginings,

REVIEWS & CHRONICLES

and experiences of measured and monitored bodies.

IRENE ACHTERBERGH CLINT ENNS ADRIENNE HUARD SHAHBAZ KHAYAMBASHI MARC MAYER INBAL NEWMAN ELLA TETRAULT

www.publicjournal.ca

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