HOW TO PARTICIPATE

Participants are invited to attend in-person at the 10th Floor Event Space in Weiser Hall or virtually. Advance registration is encouraged.

Register here for virtual attendance: https://bit.ly/3sBoiay

Register here for in-person attendance: https://myumi.ch/73xq1

TITLE

Indistinguishability/Inscrutability – Facial Recognition Technologies and the Logics of Asian American Faciality

SPEAKER

Wendy Sung is assistant professor of race, media, and digital culture in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.

ABSTRACT

The mug shot and modes of phrenological and photographic comparison to legitimate eugenics-based categorization have long been acknowledged as precursors to modern facial recognition technologies. However, this talk traces a pre-history of these technologies to different biometric past: the rise of immigration identification papers within the US when the Chinese Exclusion laws marked the formal emergence of visual documentation regulation into immigration policy. Bringing this history to bear on the present, this talk illuminates how our contemporary moment of facial attunement normalizes a forensic investigatory eye when it comes to facial logics, one that is indebted to the specificity of the Asian face. I argue that the ways the Chinese seeking entry into the US relied on the very mechanisms of racialized non-recognition— indistinguishability and inscrutability— to bypass exclusion through paper son forgeries constitute foundational logics of facial recognition technologies. Examining two examples of Asian faciality, reconstructions of the George Floyd murder and performance artist and photographer Tommy Kha’s work, this talk elucidates that the hyperscrutiny paid to the Asian face and its misrecognitions are not the glitches in facial recognition but are, in fact, central features.

This event is part of the DSI Lecture Series, and is co-sponsored by ESC.