Caged by Data: Exposing the Politics of Facial Recognition Through Zach Blas' Face Cages

With the emergence of facial recognition software, faces are continuously
digitized and analyzed through machine vision. While facial recognition
appears as an objective and unobtrusive security tool, feminist data
scholars have shown that this technology is entangled with structures
of power. This chapter explores how critical artistic responses to facial
recognition have the potential to activate feminist critiques on the politics
of facial recognition in nonverbal, material, and affective ways. Taking
Zach Blas’s Face Cages as a case study, the chapter analyzes how the art
project uses strategies of defamiliarization to instigate critical reflection
and activate an understanding of biometric datafication as a process of
capture, which entails a violent reduction of lived experiences of identity
and embodiment into biometric capta