“Defacing the Face”: Non-visibility & Queer Protest in Zach Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite
As I mentioned in my first post, my interest in Zach Blas and his piece Facial Weaponization Suite, has led me to include his supplementary paper on the project in a sort of summary/analysis. Here I hope to go into some more detail about the project, through background information from the artists himself, and some formal analysis of Blas’s piece and its attached artistic “manifesto” available on vimeo. Blas’s essay puts his art project within the context of recent events involving the use of various recognition software by state powers to both monitor and dismantle efforts within activism that strive to form an anonymous collective. The essay can be found at the New Media Caucus Media-N online journal.
The surveillance, capture and cataloging of protesters in the United States is, by now, old news. The efforts of COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence arm of the FBI, to infiltrate and disrupt (often illegally) grass roots political organizations during the 1960s has now been documented and acknowledged. These disparate but related movements opposed racist and patriarchal regimes, as well as the military-industrial complex, and were seen as immediate subversive threats to the nation’s safety. The legacy of this intrusive and paranoid governmentality persists today, and has taken on new definitions through the complex relational networks between people and technology that exists today.
Indeed activism exists in this very highly-connected tech-ecology, a fact that has irreversibly morphed contemporary protest. It is at this nexus that new and highly efficient recognition software meets efforts by the proletariat to gather and engage power while avoiding individual recognition by the state, and is what Blas wants us to get queasy about. Advancements in facial-recognition software, have increased the ubiquity of digital identification at the consumer level, with recognition software available on social media platforms and consumer devices. For Blas, these technologies have already redefined the meaning and function of a face in contemporary society, and the use of facial identification software by governments (especially to monitor political protestors) has expired “romantic notions of the face as primarily qualitative” and instead subjected them to “a mode of governance, a qualitative code, template, and standardized form of measure and management”.
The paranoiac and confrontational tendency that governments usually exhibit when it comes to the peaceful organizations of people for protest, ensure that protest is cordoned and constricted with zoning legislations for time, place and manner of protest. In 2011, tactics used to evict Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park were revealed, many of which were reasoned by the city through these laws. The other side of anti-protest action was to set bail limits based on whether arrested protesters submitted to iris scans. A hundred and sixty eight year old law against wearing masks in public (unless a masquerade party was organized) was also deployed to quell the rising trend in masked protest, emblemized by the Guy Fawkes masks worn by Anonymous. These two procedures used by the NYPD says something about the collecting of identity data that governments find crucial to disrupting political protest. Blas notes that the insistent governmentality of the face (and therefore identity) is what fuels non-identified and “devisualising” forms of political action. A consequence of this, however, is that while individual faces are removed from the equation, protest is also contingent upon visibility. A concomitance of “defacement” and “hypervisible collective transformation” can lead to being seen without being visible.
On another political sphere, facial-recognition software and biometric scans are routinely used to identify to minoratized groups, with the occasional result that face that don’t fit normative schemes are often made illegible. We can think of DMVs across the country running into noncompliance while registering Muslim women who refuse to unveil for facial scans, although the issue extends to non-normative faces and bodies themselves. According to Blas, this puts many non-normative and minoritarian people in the position of having to face discrimination while simultaneously failing biometric recognition (due to white, heteronormative machine protocols). Yet this failure can be reinforced and embraced as political action against a neoliberal, surveillance state.
It is in this space, that a performative and utopian “queer defacing” occurs as a means for political transformation. Blas writes, “I suggest that such defacements, in their refusals of normative identificatory regimes and utopic expressions, are forms of queer illegibility, which I theorize as an aesthetic and political practice of anti-normativity and anti-standardization at a technical global scale…”. This is where Blas’s brilliant art project, Facial Weaponization Suite comes in. Using the 3D scans of participants in a workshop, masks are created out of the aggregates of various faces, to form a single opaque mask that can fail identification by facial-recognition software. The project is both an affront to the larger issue of machine mediated forms of identity and body forms, and a political reaction to categorize visible features of race, gender and ethnicity. The first of these masks were created with a group of queer men, in response to a university study that claimed its test subjects could recognize sexual orientation by looking at static images of faces, even when the durations of exposure to the images were limited to microseconds. This study implies that sexuality is recognizable through physical features, and is therefore biologically inscribed. According to Blas, these studies negate subjective attempts to interpret faces, which have historically resulted in acts of homophobic violence against those appearing to have a “fag face”. In an interview, Blas talks about how the Fag Face Mask denotes this scientifically validated form of homophobia; “I liked the idea that if one homosexual face can supposedly be rapidly identified, then wearing the faces of 30 queer men at the same time produces something unrecognizable”.
So what are the implications of this performative act of faceless, non-visibility? In the same interview, Blas points out that he is interested in queerness not so much as an identifier of sexuality, but a style or form of aesthetic and political practice, that imagines worlds outside of normative and standardized models of living. It is also about finding new ways of expressing, of relating to others, and about bringing people together in ways that “no capitalist state or biometric can contribute to or foster”.
Zach Blas’s masks, as well his collaborative project Queer Technologies with transgender artists and theorist Micha Cárdenas (which I’ll be covering in my next post), are interested in discovering new approaches to living in the technological worlds, especially for minoratized and othered groups. In this way they are aesthetic mediations of contemporary socio-political realities, that are brought forth through the use of mediums that operate in contemporary, technological spheres. The connotations are both felt and read in the technical and formal aspects of the masks themselves, which are designed using 3D rendering and printing software. The opaque, blob-like, masks that form generate togetherness and solidarity by collecting and superimposing faces of many participants. The use of new medium in this sense, also lends the project a particular imaginative and utopian quality. For artists such as Blas, futurity is a definite concern, and queerness “is what conceptualizes both the political refusal and the utopian imaginaries” in their artwork. Art works that imagine performativity through new technological mediums can shape political action in radical ways, by incorporating such queer, alternative, reflex, anti-normative and non-teleological futurist imaginaries. By refusing to be recognized, Blas’s queer activist is also refusing more public forms of political recognition, as is the case for a queer refusal of state sanctioned legitimization of homosexuality through marriage certificates. Queer failure, is then the implicit, voluntary failure to cohere and succumb to recognition, state visibility, and scientific and algorithmic identification of sexuality.
Failure, performativity, and faces are explored in similarly interesting ways in the art projects I will survey in my next post, where my analysis should be displaced over different works that utilize new mediums in new and awesome ways…
