The prohibitions applied to humans who differ from the white norm have been updated in order to ensure to the structures that control our bodies a supposed honesty attributed to science and monitoring and security technologies. The capture of presence, be it by visual or audiovisual means or through temperature sensing, motion detection, or other identification and recording systems, is imposed on us as inescapable.

The technological means that allow these various forms of surveillance and classification of human types and their movements are not a novelty and are based on the difference and the variety of people’s phenotypes as an alert to danger. Pseudosciences, such as phrenology, developed by the German physician Franz Joseph Gall at the end of the 18th century, and which had as its greatest exponent the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, are deterministic when stating that one can assess a great deal of information of individuals, from temperament to character and personality, or even a propensity for criminality, based on biological characteristics expressed in the phenotype.

The American L. A. Vaught published a detailed manual in 1902 with illustrations which demonstrated how, according to this moral and ideological doctrine, individual physical features were related to an individual’s psychological and emotional characteristics and to their capacity for judgment. The 254-page book is a great work of fiction about how signs of difference are a threat to the political, social and family order.

With the presence of non-white populations in Europe and in the territories invaded by European nations, these same theories propagated as a tool of social regulation. From the condition of birth, education, and the professional possibilities, many aspects of modern life were guided by criteria such as the origin, ethnicity, color and culture. The aesthetic variation in the form of noses, foreheads and mouths, among other markers, were to become a minor issue for these false sciences, when compared to ethnicity, color and culture.

The opportunity for a prosperous future began to be filtered through the image, determining those who would have, or not, the desired characteristics to live this future. In the course of the 20th century, there were numerous prohibitions applied by analyzing the phenotype setting of human beings, classifying them into desirable and undesirable types, capable and incapable, with the purpose of selecting the aspirants to this dreamed-of society. In order to do this, technologies for exclusion were systematized which, in truth, were always guided by the human eye.

In the case of facial recognition security systems, the eye which develops and tests the software is flawed when faced with a wide sample of individuals. The limited presence of certain human groups in some territories does not justify the fact that softwares marketed throughout the world – with an emphasis on the West – are inaccurate when it comes to distinguishing and identifying women, in their range of womanhood, and non-white people, in general.

The intentional lack of improvement of the algorithms that guide these technologies is intended to bring up to date and incorporate, in a perverse and anachronistic way, the divergent characteristics of human forms that have already been studied as being unavoidable physical, psychological, emotional and moral deformities, and that, consequently, needed to be retained or eliminated. 

The popular and collective insurrections undertaken by movements of populations which form the majority – although being political minorities – against the necropolitics of management by the state and oligarchy reveal that we understand well what is yelled at us by means of control and oppression, disguised as being security and social welfare. Thus, the image, in motion or not, declines as a documentary indicator of irrefutable criminal evidence for public security agencies, because it is conditioned, once again, to twisted purposes.

The bankruptcy of the Western project of society projects itself in the inability we have to coexist with the idea that all people can transit through and construct, or even dream of, other worlds, from the natural and singular authority of their morphologies. ///

Captions and credits for the fragments used in the collages here.

Renata Felinto (São Paulo, SP, 1978) is a visual artist, researcher and professor, with a bachelor’s, master’s and doctor’s degree in Visual Arts from the Instituto de Artes/ Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). She is also a specialist in curatorship and education in art museums by Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP). Winner of the 3rd Select Art and Education Award and the 2020 PIPA Award.

Originally published in ZUM Magazine #24, April 2023

Tags: revista ZUM, ZUM #24