Always in Focus: Facial-recognition technology, optics and resistance in political unrest
In response to the use of increasingly data-intensive methods of facial surveillance by law enforcement agencies, the face has been employed as a subversive political trope in the work of activists, artists and contemporary poets.
By Dr Tyne Sumner, ARC Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Culture and Communication, CAIDE Summer Research Academy
Unlike the often-invoked CCTV camera as a mechanism for facial surveillance, in the contemporary surveillance matrix the target of surveillance frequently emerges from data. As Virginia Eubanks has written of the facial data mined and analyzed in order to identify possible suspects of crimes: ‘If the old surveillance was an eye in the sky, the new surveillance is a spider in a digital web, testing each connected strand of suspicious vibrations’ (122). In this formulation, surveillance is no longer merely a means of watching and tracing, it also functions as a mechanism for categorization, social sorting and control. Processes of classification are, themselves, demarcations of power that frame ‘the conditions of possibilities of those who are classified’ (Cheney-Lippold 7). Yet while classification systems are frequently sites of political and social struggles, as Bowker and Star write, their ‘charged agendas are often first presented as purely technical and they are difficult even to see’ (196).
Recent political protests have signaled a change in the way that facial-recognition technology has been used by law enforcement agencies, resisted by citizens, and understood by the general public. The 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, also known as the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement, were pivotal in the resistance and critique of police-led facial-recognition technology. The protests began over a proposed bill that would have allowed the extradition of criminal suspects to jurisdictions with which Hong Kong did not have agreements, including mainland China and Taiwan. In the background to growing political unrest, China was rapidly expanding its invasive facial-recognition surveillance, including vast networks of cameras and tracking tools aimed at facilitating planned arrests. In June 2019, as demonstrations turned confrontational, protestors strategically covered their faces to evade police surveillance strategies aimed at singling out targets for arrest via portable cameras affixed to poles. Observing how a ‘quest to identify protestors and police officers’ had ‘people in both groups desperate to protect their anonymity,’ The New York Times ran an article suggestively titled, ‘In Hong Kong Protests, Faces Become Weapons’, which detailed the extent to which the protests had weaponized identity on the part of both protestors and police.
Two months later, when violent clashes broke out in Tsim Sha Tui in the semiautonomous region of Hong Kong, police fired beanbag rounds into crowds of protestors, rupturing the right eye of Indonesian journalist Veby Mega Indah. As footage proliferated of the young woman’s face streaming with blood, the incident became indexical to a new political logic of visuality in which the deliberate suppression of sight through police brutality was seen as an overtly political act. While physical abuse is common in violent standoffs between police and protestors, many believed the injury was the result of a deliberate police strategy of targeting demonstrator’s eyes: literal blinding to cut off the figurative vision of a democratic agenda. In this instance, the face was seen not as ‘an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels’ but instead as a sharply personal and particular illustration of the extent to which police were willing to go to stifle dissent (Deleuze and Guattari 167). ‘As rebellious Hong Kongers seized upon the potent symbol of the wounded eye,’ writes George James, ‘we saw that blindness is not the dream but the nightmare, of all those resisting the gaze of a voyeuristic state machinery whose lenses do not sleep.’
In addition to a mass online show of support in the form of Tweets and slogans such as ‘Return the eye’ and ‘#Eye4HK,’ contemporary poets also responded to the incident, questioning the assumed impartiality of facial-recognition technology in online responses that foreground the subjectivity of individuals involved in the unrest. Challenging the concept of the face as a proxy for regulatory control, Hong Kong writer and academic Tammy Lai-Ming Ho’s poem ‘The Eye’ reflects on the centrality of vision and observation to Hong Kong’s fight for democratic autonomy. Detailing the loss of vision incurred at the hands of police brutality, Ho writes:
‘A crater, a window, an entrance to the soul, a lone well, an empty dish, a lamp to the body – is collectively mourned; heartbreaking and haunting. A young woman lost an eye in her beloved city, the result of certain people already having turned half blind. One eye open, one eye closed: only surveilling, seeing selective sights, scenes and sins.’
The poem is both an affecting response to the casualties of political insurrection and a clever act of counter-surveillance. The woman’s other eye turns its gaze back upon the surveillance agencies themselves (‘one eye open’), configuring the violent conflicts between demonstrators and authorities in Hong Kong around a new frame of protest: seeing as a response to being seen. By foregrounding the eye’s mobility – its ‘structuring of space through the gaze’ – Ho’s poem is a defiant response to China’s growing and sophisticated surveillance network (Frow 229). Most crucially, it is also an example of the ways that contemporary writers have developed a powerful counter-visuality to the degraded epistemic function of the visual in the context of accelerating datafication. This act, an instantaneous poetic and political gesture through the medium of online poetry, pushes back against the datafication of our identities that facial-recognition technology strives for.
Poetry, then, counters the intended goal of data-driven facial-recognition technology, which seeks to collapse the boundary between appearance and interiority, actions and speech, the face and subjectivity. Mark Andrejevic has described this goal as the ‘automation of judgement,’ an ‘endpoint’ that ‘represents the attempt to overcome the limitation of the human frame: that of the subject’ (12). Through poetry – perhaps an unlikely source for scholars of surveillance – it is possible to examine modes of personhood and self-expression that deflect, confuse and resist intensifying surveillant technologies and their increasingly ubiquitous role in moments of political unrest.
REFERENCES
Andrejevic, Mark. “Automating surveillance.” Surveillance & Society, 17 (2019): 7-13. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.12930
Bowker, Geoffrey and Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Cheney-Lippold, John. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of our Digital Selves. New York: New York University Press, 2017.
Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2018.
Frow, John. Character and Person. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Guittari, Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
James, George. “Gaze Against the Machine: Counter-visuality and hyperreal strategics in the Hong Kong protests.” Epoché July 2020.
Mozur, Paul. “In Hong Kong Protests, Faces Become Weapons.” The New York Times. July 26, 2019.
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Tyne is an ARC Postdoctoral Research Associate for ‘Literature & the Face: A Critical History.’ Her research explores the relationship between literature and surveillance, with a focus on the ways that poetry offers ways of thinking about concepts such as privacy, identity, confession and subjectivity in the context of digital technology and the increasing datafication of everyday life. Her monograph, Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance, is forthcoming with Routledge in 2021.