The Warning Within Zach Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite

Written by Sam Perelmuter

Edited by Lucia Bell-Epstein 

The history of art and visual culture is deeply intertwined with the history of colonialism. Nineteenth-century artist-ethnographers such as Charles Henri Joseph Cordier relied upon scientific racism, which then dominated the humansciences, in order to inform the physical depictions of non-white subjects in their sculptures. In turn, these same sculptures served to confirm and reinforce the racist, heteronormative colonial discourses of nineteenth-century humansciences. Artist, activist, and writer Zach Blas is keenly aware of a resurgence of racist nineteenth-century pseudoscientific beliefs in the Human Sciences today, and identifies these same beliefs as the fundamental underpinning in contemporary biometric science and technology, specifically in biometric facial recognition technology. Blas’s 2011-14 Facial Weaponization Suite responds to this regression in contemporary scientific discourse through community workshops and the production of masks, [Fig. 1] which do not register as a face when scanned by biometric facial recognition technologies. In doing so, Blas’s work highlights nineteenth-century colonialist scientific thought as the fundamental underpinning for biometric facial recognition technology.

 Fig. 1: Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite, Fag Face Mask, 2011.

 Nineteenth-century colonialism relied upon the intersection of the human sciences and the visual arts,manifesting largely through sculpture, in order to normalize colonial ideals of race (blackness), gender, and sexuality [1][2]. These ideals positioned the white male body as the pinnacle of a racial hierarchy and asserted that racial identity was inherent within the body [3]. The Human Sciences were relied upon as knowledge that reified ideals of white supremacy and defined ‘black’ and ‘white’ as separate species. As separate species, ‘black’ and ‘white’ were viewed as stable, unchanging categories fundamental to one’s identity [4], which in turn dictated the moral, intellectual, and psychological capacities of the individual [5]. Establishing a separation and hierarchy of racial types that privileged the white male body over others, specifically over black bodies, provided justification for colonial pursuits, as well as American justification for chattel slavery [6]. If ‘black’ people were morally, intellectually, and psychologically inferior to ‘whites’, as “proven” by “science”, it followed that they should be the ones doing menial and manual labour. So-called ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ did not exist before colonial thought invaded the human sciences and visual arts; they are the products of this regulatory ideal [7].

Fig. 2: Charles Henri Joseph Cordier, Vénus Africaine, Cast c. 1855-1900. 

 Within this racist, pseudoscientific colonial discourse on biology and race, sculpture was called upon to provide visual proof of race as biological truth by depicting differences as anatomical elements in their renderings of the human body [8]. The Human Sciences easily drew upon pervading notions of the ideal body, as well as the material and aesthetic processes of nineteenth-century Neo-Classical sculpture in order to provide concrete evidence of biological, racial difference, instilling the white male body at the top of a prejudiced hierarchy [9]. As such, the sculptures of artist-ethnographers like Charles Henri Joseph Cordier functioned as objective “scientific” evidence of biological racial difference, implying the inferiority of non-whites in their support of biologically rationalized colonization and slavery.

Fig. 3: Charles Henri Joseph Cordier, Abyssinian Girl, 1866. 

Cordier was commissioned by the French government to create ethnographic busts of different racial types,which would be placed in an ethnographic museum, a request tied to fears concerning miscegenation, racial mixing, and the “extinction” of different racial types [10]. Cordier’s project was based in racial essentialism [11], and he travelled throughout France’s Northern African colonies assembling sculptural busts of the different racial types he encountered[Figs. 2, 3, 4]. Cordier had a specific method in the assemblage of his ethnographic busts, in which he would work with multiple models in order to identify the “common characteristics” of a racial type. From there, he would combine the multiple individuals he observed into a composite bust— an ideal type that was meant to accurately depict the defining characteristics of its race, through a single individual [12]. As a white French man, Cordier’s problematic understanding of ideal “types” and beauty would have been shaped by his own idea of what “common characteristics” were.Additionally, his personal understanding of beauty would have been heavily informed by the dominant colonial discourse of the time, further influencing his perception [13]. Cordier’s strategy of selecting and combining physical features to produce ideal racial types validated the racist pseudoscientific beliefs of nineteenth-century human sciences. It is clear how Cordier’s ethnographic busts helped to legitimize the claims of the human sciences while also drawing credibility from these same “scientific” claims, resulting in a discursive echo-chamber that legitimizes white supremacy.

Fig. 4:  Charles Henri Joseph Cordier, The Algerian, c. 1850-57.  

 It has been over 200 years since the start of the nineteenth century and much progress has been made both socially and technologically. Western society would like to think that it has rejected colonial discourses and greatly distanced itself from the racist pseudoscientific beliefs and practices so prevalent throughout the nineteenth-century. Though there truly has been advances in social and scientific arenas in this regard, our rejection of and distance from these practices have been overstated. Contemporary science has seen a resurgence of thought based on the same racist pseudoscientific beliefs that corralled nineteenth-century Human Sciences’ support of colonialism and slavery. This resurgence can be seen in works such as Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which uses IQ tests to establish ethnic differences in cognitive abilities. The Bell Curve argues that the white population generally has higher cognitive abilities than that of the black population [1] [2] on the basis that “the average white person tests higher [on an IQ test] than about 84 percent of the population of blacks,” [14].

The IQ test has been widely criticized for its sociocultural, economic, and racial/ethnic minority biases, with further arguments being made that reliance on these inaccurate test scores perpetuates social and economic injustices against said minority groups [15]. There is also ample evidence that intelligence test scores are affected by personal and motivational factors that have little or no relation to cognitive ability or performance [16]. Writers such as Frederick Douglass, and many more since, have devoted significant time and effort refuting nineteenth-century theories of black intellectual inferiority [17], yet these same colonial theories are finding validation in works such as The Bell Curve. Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady’s 2008 study tested whether participants could accurately judge “the sexual orientation of faces presented for 50 ms, 100 ms, 6500 ms, 10,000 ms, and at a self-paced rate (averaging 1500 ms),” concluding that participants accurately identified the sexual orientation of a given face at “above-chance levels with no decrease in accuracy for briefer exposures,” [18]. This entire study is founded upon nineteenth-century desires to read true identity from the body. We may also see colonial ideals masquerading as a contemporary scientific thought in the arguments drawing on recent genetic research put forth by evolutionary biologists, geneticists, biological anthropologists and medical researchers in order to dispute the notion that race is a socially constructed concept rather than a biological truth [19].

It was Rule and Ambady’s study, as well as a similar one from the University of Washington in 2012, which served as the motivation behind Zach Blas’s 2011-14 Facial Weaponization Suite [20]. As Blas explains in his articleQueer Escape, studies such as these “[parse] us into categories that will be used against us [and] gives us a visibility that only controls us, and makes us easily knowable to those in power,” [21]. It is, however, the Biometric Sciences and biometric facial recognition technology in particular that Blas identifies as fertile ground for the reintegration of white supremacist, heteronormative, colonial ideals under the guise of scientific and technological progress.

Biometrics, as explained by Shoshana Magnet, is “the application of modern statistical techniques to measure the human body and is defined as the science of using biological information for the purposes of identification,” [22]. It quickly becomes clear how Biometrics could lend itself to supporting problematic colonial ideals of white supremacy and heteronormativity. While the biometric industry claims that by letting objective machines sort through biometric processes, thereby eliminating human subjectivity [23], it is important to remember that those objective machines are coded by human beings with their own set of beliefs and biases. As Andreas Ekström explains: “behind every algorithm is always a person, a person with a set of personal beliefs that no code can ever completely eradicate,” [24]. Ekström underscores that personal biases and ideologies may be inserted into supposedly objective functions. Individual and sociocultural biases are thus fundamentally programmed into biometric technologies, specifically facial recognition technologies.

An important goal of biometric science, and the facial recognition technologies it produces, is to quickly and correctly identify large numbers of people who pass through biometric scanners. A quick and efficient way of speeding up identification processes is to reduce the size of the database with which an individual face is compared, a process which relies on “soft biometrics”. Soft biometrics are used to quickly eliminate large sections of a database whichclearly would not match with the scanned face, and do so by referencing categories of race and gender [25]. Ironically, biometric identification technologies have been observed to routinely struggle in identifying gender and particularly struggle in identifying race [26][27].  When these patterns of failure are considered in tandem with the fact that soft biometrics explicitly draw on categories of race and gender, which themselves stem from racist nineteenth-century pseudoscience, we see a dissonance between the proposed objectivity and the subjective results of biometric facial recognition technologies. As Magnet explains, “biometric science consistently fails to examine existing literature on the complexity of bodily identities as well as theory on the interpretation of scientific images,” [28]. As a result, biometrics fundamentally rely upon notions of the human body and identity as “stable” and “unchanging”— the same language used in ninteenth-century justification of colonialism and chattel slavery.

In studying the failures of biometric identification technologies we may see new identities being formed which Magnet refers to as “biometrifiable” and “unbiometrifiable” bodies [29]. Biometric identification failures include: difficulty scanning the hands of Asian women, iris scanners excluding those with visual impairments or in wheelchairs, egregious issues in correctly identifying races other than white, and the inability to identify long-haired metrosexual men as men or women wearing ties as women [30]. Magnet keenly notes that these technologies “regularly overtarget, fail to identify, and exclude particular communities,” [31] and in doing so produce the binary of biometrifiable versus unbiometrifiable bodies.

It is important to note that biometric failures regularly occur in the identification of minority groups. Due to the inherent reliance on white supremacist, heteronormative, colonial ideals of race and gender programmed into it, the failures of biometric recognition technologies illuminate the biometrifiable body as the classical white male body, while all ‘other’ bodies are unbiometrifiable. The further individuals move from the white male body, the more they merge or diverge from traditional markers of race, gender, and sexuality, the more unbiometrifiable they become. This binary has material consequences, as unbiometrifiable bodies are regularly denied access to basic human rights, such as mobility, employment, food, and housing; Magnet’s work further illuminates the ways in which “state institutions deploy biometrics to enact institutionalized forms of state power upon vulnerable populations,” [32]. The deployment of biometric technologies by state institutions in order to enact institutionalized power on ‘othered’ minority groups casts biometric failures in an insidiously productive light— the binary of biometrifiable and unbiometrifiable bodies works to include some bodies as part of the nation-state (biometrifiable), while excluding other bodies (unbiometrifiable). This “productive” failing of biometric identification technologies, which results in an oppositional binary of identity, both draws upon and parallels the creation and usage of the white/black binary in the nineteenth-century.

Fig. 5:  Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite, Fag Face Mask, 2011. 

Charmaine Nelson explains the ways in which the narration of the black body allowed artists to represent black subjects as racially “other” within the arena of Neo-Classical sculpture [33]. In much the same way, biometric science allows for non-white people to be inscribed, rather than simply depicted, as racially other within the “objective” fields of biometric and genetic sciences. Furthermore, just as the material and aesthetic practices of nineteenth-century Neo-Classical sculpture lent themselves to supporting racist pseudoscientific colonial ideals, biometric technologies and their failures are perfectly suited to contemporary neo-colonial practices in the human sciences. These practices reinforce, validate, and extend a similar racial binary to that created in the nineteenth-century.

Fig. 6:  Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite, Fag Face Mask, 2011. 

Zach Blas’s 2011-14 Facial Weaponization Suite consisted of community workshops in which Blas discussed biometrics and queer theory, followed by the production of a collective mask by the workshop participants. Initially conceived in response to the previously mentioned 2008 and 2012 studies on the ability to identify sexual orientation from the face, Blas’s first mask, the Fag Face Mask [Fig. 1], was made by compiling the facial data of homosexual workshop participants with a Microsoft Kinect. Uploading this data to a 3D modelling software, Blas and the workshop participants do not create a facial composite in the manner of Cordier, but rather aggregate and manipulate the facial data until it becomes an amorphous blob that is utterly unrecognizable as a face to biometric facial recognition technologies [Figs. 5, 6, 7] [34]. This format remained the same for each subsequent workshop and mask, which focused on biometrics in relation to issues of race, feminism’s relations to concealment and imperceptibility, and the US-Mexico border [35].

Fig. 7:  Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite, Fag Face Mask, 2011. 

Central to the production of Cordier’s ethnographic busts was the use of the white gaze as an ‘objective’ tool of scrutiny, perpetuating racist and heteronormative ideals [36]. The method of production of Blas’s masks is quite similar to the method employed by Cordier in the production of his ethnographic busts [Figs. 2, 3, 4], notable distinctions being that Blas does not amalgamate the participants faces into a single composite, and the resulting work is not recognizable as a human face. In not amalgamating the participants faces into a single composite, Blas rejects Cordier’s reliance on the white gaze which perpetuates white supremacist, heteronormative, colonial ideals. Blas further identifies this white gaze as a fundamental basis for biometric science; by producing a mask that is wholly unrecognizable as a face, Blas invokes the habitual failures of biometric identification technologies in order to expose the inequalities that emerge when normative categories are forced upon non-normative populations.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks renewed racial fears in America, and it is no coincidence that the prevalence and popularity of biometric identification technologies rapidly grew in its wake [37]. Presently, we see biometric identification technologies increasingly related to notions of safety, security, and surveillance, while being simultaneously integrated into commercial settings. Biometric identification technologies have been increasingly used to enforce border security, [38] while also being found in car ignition switches [39] and personalized advertisements marketed to individuals based on their gender, race, and physical and behavioural traits [40]. These types of identification technologies are becoming inescapable in almost every aspect of our lives.

In response, Zach Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite highlights the analogical functions of biometrics and nineteenth-century pseudoscientific discourse in creating oppositional binary identities. Blas’s work shows how this binary supports traditional white supremacist, heteronormative, colonial ideals, and takes steps to combat this. Specifically, his community workshops are important first steps in addressing who does and does not participate in discussions concerning the expansion and development of biometric studies and identification technologies. By producing masks that are unidentifiable as individual faces by biometric facial recognition technologies, Blas exposes a contemporary binary of “biometrifiable” versus “unbiometrifiable” bodies; this binary defines biometrifiable bodies as whites bodies in opposition to those unbiometrifiable bodies, which are then necessarily non-white. Facial Weaponization Suite forces us to directly confront the failings of biometric identification technologies, and the discursive effects they produce.

endnotes

[1] Charmaine A. Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) p. XXX. [2] Charmaine A Nelson, “Venus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African-ness,” Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800-1900, eds. Jan March (Aldershot, Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2005) p. 50. [3] Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XIX. [4] Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XXVII. [5] Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XXXIII-XXXIV. [6] Charmaine A. Nelson, “Lecture” ARTH 354B Introduction to Nineteenth Century Sculpture, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 7 February 2019. [7] Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XIX. [8] Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XXX. [9] Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XXX. [10] Nelson, “Lecture,” 7 February 2019. [11] Nelson, “Venus Africaine,” p. 53. [12] Nelson, “Venus Africaine,” p. 55. [13] Nelson, “Venus Africaine,” p. 55. [14] Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, (London: Free Press, 1996), p. 269. [15] Richard A. Weinberg, “Intelligence and IQ: Landmark issues and great debates,” American Psychologist, vol. 44, no. 2 (February 1989), np. [16] Edward Zigler and Victoria Seitz, “Social Policy and Intelligence,” Handbook of Human Intelligence, eds. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 597-599. [17] Charmaine A. Nelson, “Lecture” ARTH 354B Introduction to Nineteenth Century Sculpture, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 31 January 2019 [18] Ambady, Nalini and Nicholas O. Rule, “Brief exposures: Male sexual orientation is accurately perceived at 50 ms,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 44 (2008), p. 1100. [19] Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Straw Men and Their Followers: The return of biological race,” Is Race Real? A web forum organized by the Social Science Research Council, Jun 07, 2006, (date of last access April 10 2019), http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Hammonds/, np. [20] Zach Blas, “Facial Weaponization Suite,” Zach Blas, (date of last access 10 April 2019) http://www.zachblas.info/works/facial-weaponization-suite/, np. [21] Zach Blas, “Weapons for Queer Escape,” Schlossplatz³, Issue 10: Identity (Crisis), vol. 10, (Spring 2011), p. 24. [22] Shoshana Amielle Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 8. [23] Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 11. [24] Andreas Ekström, “The Moral Bias Behind Your Search Results,” TEDxOslo, Oslo, January 2015, (date of last access 10 April 2019), https://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_ekstrom_the_moral_bias_behind_your_search_results?language=en, 8:15. [25] Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 14. [26] Zach Blas, “Escaping the Face: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Facial Weaponization Suite,” Media-N, CAA Conference Edition, vol. 9, no. 2 (Summer 2013), np. [27] Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 153, 154. [28] Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 154. [29] Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 5. [30] Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 5, pp. 153-154. [31] Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 5. [32] Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 9, 150. [33] Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XXXI. [34] Zach Blas, and Jacob Gaboury, “Biometrics and Opacity: A Conversation,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 31, no. 2_92 (2016), pp. 157-158. [35] Blas, “Facial Weaponization Suite,” (date of last access 10 April 2019), np. [36] Nelson, “Venus Africaine,” p. 53. [37] Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 9. [38] Blas, “Escaping the Face,” np. [39] Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 6. [40] Blas, “Escaping the Face,” np.