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<p>Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies
to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation <italic>Informatic Opacity:
Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement</italic>
charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor
opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies
in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example,
I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in
order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical
standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact
non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures
of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face
biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through
acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics
of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to
visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic
opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global,
technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity
and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity
imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: <italic>Facial
Weaponization Suite</italic>, a series of masks and public actions, and <italic>Face
Cages</italic>, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence
of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based
method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance
studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender
studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.</p>
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