Read Your Mind: Facial Recognition Technology and Contemporary Chinese Portraiture

Abstract:

This talk explores the links between facial recognition technology and contemporary Chinese portraiture. Its starting point is a recent paper published by two AI researchers based in China. The article introduces a facial recognition algorithm apparently capable of predicting the status of an individual as a convicted criminal with almost 90% accuracy using only a driver’s license-style photograph. Unsurprisingly, the paper attracted a furious backlash, as commentators around the world pointed out its unabashed parallels with the long-discredited pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology.

 Less obvious, though equally intriguing, is the relationship between this branch of facial recognition technology and the practices of art-making. To explore this rapport, I turn to the work of contemporary painters Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun, whose experiments in the domain of portraiture mirror in mocking ways the operations of machine learning software which attempts to read the human mind and predict our behaviour. These links matter because they make clear the extent to which many facial recognition technologies are themselves forms of aesthetic media. They are modes of governance on the rise which draw blatantly on portraiture in its varied genealogies. This reliance on art, the disdained domain of subjectivity, within the supposedly objective field of affective computing shakes the latter’s creation myth: namely, that our identity is biologically fixed in ways which only the most scientific methods can disclose.