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Zach Blas: Informatic Opacity and The Cage of Information
25.11.2019 • 11/4/19 18:00 – 11/4/19 20:00
Room 7.214 of the IG-Farben Building

This talk situates the face in the early 21st century as a site of struggle between biometric capture and political refusals of recognition, suggesting a new theory of the face is needed for this contemporary context.

 

First, the talk suggests that the term capture is a more precise approach to understanding the face in relation to surveillance today. Particularly with biometric facial recognition, the captured face is stripped of its embodied context and turned into a diagrammatic cage, in order to be submitted to a variety of standardization protocols for analysis, control, and generation.

 

By thinking with a series of minoritarian writers on opacity (Glissant, Haraway, and de Villiers), an anti-biometric theory of the face (and body) is developed that insists on the situatedness of embodiment and the limits of recognition as a political goal. “Informatic opacity” is offered as a practice of technical non-standardization, which thwarts recognition via computational vision. The concept is also explored across my own art practice.

 

**The talk is open to the public.**

Fig. 1:
1. Image by Zach Blas, SANCTUM, 2018
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