RCCHC "Science, Technology, Society and Culture" Talk Series #5 - Sketching from Life? Facial Recognition Technologies and Art Photography in China

This talk explores the relationship between facial recognition technologies and contemporary Chinese visual culture. Its point of departure is a recent biometric algorithm developed by a team of computer scientists based in China, a program capable of generating highly plausible photographic headshots from rough-and-ready freehand sketches of the human face. The implications of a machine learning tool such as this – which has clear utility for law enforcement – are many and deep. The paper maps out this terrain, highlighting the relationship between composite photography and criminology.

My core focus, though, is the close but often hidden relationship between facial recognition technologies and art-making. To explore this submerged linkage, the talk turns to the work of the Chinese photographer Zhang Wei, an artist who has worked extensively with composite images. Zhang’s work holds up a mirror to the use of such images within the AI realm, and his oeuvre and the algorithm together illuminate the generative interface between facial recognition technologies and experimental art photography. Ultimately, these parallels are worthy of attention because they show that many facial recognition technologies are themselves forms of visual media. They are interventions in the domain of policing and control which borrow from pictorial traditions of portraiture, old and new. This recourse to art, the disdained domain of subjectivity, within the supposedly scientific field of facial algorithms shakes the latter’s foundational myth: namely, that our identity is genomically predetermined in ways which only the most objective methods can disclose.