WEEK 4
Kelly Gates- The Past Perfect Promise of Facial Recognition Technology

&

Mark Shepard- Minor Urbanism: Everyday Entanglements of Technology and Urban Life (not mentioned)

& 

Zach Blas

"Biometrics are not the first technical effort to connect bodies to identities"- Kelly Gates

Gates brings up a good point that biometrics have been being developed since the 19th century through the use of photography, anthropometry, and dactyloscopy (fingerprinting). When were these considered "not enough"? Why must we now have facial recognition software? The answer is that the world is trying to avoid random acts of terrorism, like 9/11.  It is stated that photography is "a medium uniquely suited to truth production." Although photographs of peoples faces limits that ability to give them an identity. Anthropometry is used to categorize people into standardized bodily measurements and fingerprinting is used to classify people at the seen of a crime, to give everyone "in the system" a number of reference, so we all can be found at any given moment.  It has been a hot topic discussion that technology is a problem, and they are trying to correct this problem with technology.  Pat Gil is quoted "technostalgia"- the desire to revise the past to re-determine the present, while at the same time admitting the impossibility of this endeavor. Biometrics is the new wave of classifying people: facial recognition, digital fingerprints, hand geometry, voice recognition, iris and retina scanning, and DNA scanning.  Facial recognition is still not as developed as they wish it to be, it gives you general features, in a process called feature extraction. The point is that a computer is not yet capable of remember faces like humans do. I believe at some point they will, but is this a breach of our privacy. Look around you the next time you are walking the streets, and take note on whether or not there are cameras pointed at you at that moment.  Soon we will be living in a real world 1984.

Zach Blas has made a career of creating thought provoking designs that skew the way video surveillance can see the person it is recording. Blas quotes Kelly Gates ideas about the dual gain of facial recognition in his article "automate the mediated process of connecting faces to identities, and to enable the distribution of those identities access computer networks." He has found a way combine multiple faces into one mask so that the surveillance camera is capturing "the face of many."