Today, in our world of information capital and global empire, biometric control has
emerged as a golden frontier for neoliberal governance, a multi-billion-dollar industry
in security and marketing sectors. Biometric companies produce devices like iris scans and
facial recognition machines with the hopes of manufacturing the perfect automated identification
tools that can successfully read a core identity off the body. Biometric devices are becoming
powerful weapons to control and police national borders and citizenship status, track and target
the nation or companies enemies and criminals as well as to profile and parse various sectors of
the public into potential risk categories, like activists. Biometrics also determined marketing
strategies through standardized algorithmic processing of identification markers such as
gender and race. Biometric technologies rely heavily on stable and normative conceptions of
identity, and thus, structural failures are encoded in biometrics that discriminate against
race, class, gender, sex, and disability. For example, fingerprint devices often fail to scan
the hands of Asian women and iris scans work poorly if an eye has cataracts. Biometric failure
exposes the inequalities that emerge when normative categories are forced upon populations.
Facial recognition technology has become a pervasive, popular device for biometric surveillance,
a thriving, rapidly developing part of our new surveillance culture. Facial recognition
techniques now range from algorithms that extract landmarks on faces, such as cheekbones, noses,
eyes, and jaws, to 3D programs that map the shape of a face to various forms of skin texture analysis.
Typically, faces are collected in databases to compare and search against for a variety of
possible criminal activities. For example, in its 2000 presidential election, the Mexican government
used facial recognition to prevent voter fraud. In 2001, Tampa Bay police used identic facial
recognition software to search for criminals and terrorists during the Super Bowl, finding 19
people with pending arrest warrants. Within the last year, occupied activists and Afghan civilians
have been the target of massive biometric data-gathering sweeps by U.S. police and military forces.
The ubiquity of facial recognition now spans from London's massive CCTV network
to the German Federal Criminal Police Office, Facebook's Facial Recognition Autofototagging,
Apple's iPhoto and iPhone, Google's PyCaza, U.S. Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department
of State, which has the largest facial recognition system in the world, at over 75 million photographs
for visa processing. We also commonly experience facial recognition and detection now with our
digital cameras that locate faces, and even smiles. Facial recognition has even ventured into the
terrain of sexual orientation. The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology recently published
a 2008 study conducted at Tufts University that tested people's ability to identify homosexual men
from photos of their faces. 90 faces were shown to 90 participants against a white background.
The faces were stripped of all markings and accessories, such as piercings and eyeglasses.
Even hair was cropped, leaving participants with only the face. Those tested proved remarkably
accurate in their ability to recognize faces that had been classified as homosexual,
even when exposed to the face for only 50 milliseconds, which is not possible to process
consciously. Even when a section of the face was shown, such as an eye or a lips, participants
still correctly identified the homosexual faces. A similar study recently emerged at the University
of Washington in 2012. What could be the benefits of proving it to the world that such a recognition
apparatus exists? Does it not only further confirm and scientifically validate one of
the processes of LGBTIQ stereotyping, categories like fag face and gay face? It is easy enough
to claim that these studies parse us into categories that will inevitably be used against us.
It offers a visibility that will attempt to control, monitor, and police us.
In response to facial recognition technologies, we ask, what are the tactics and techniques for
making our faces non-existent? How do we flee this visibility into the fog of a queerness that
refuses to be recognized? Today, there are numerous modulations of a queer politics centering around
gaining visibility through recognition. Just think of current debates around same-sex marriage in the
U.S. Such calls to visibility typically coincide with a desire for recognition from the state
or a longing to be validated by Arnie a liberal order. But there is also another queer politics
that could be said to be concerned with the non-recognizable, a politics that is anti-state
and anti-recognition. Let's call it a politics of escape. Escape not only expresses a desire to
exit current regimes of control but also to cultivate forms of living otherwise.
We propose to start making faces our weapons. We can create and learn many faces and wear them
interchangeably. A face is like being armed. Think of the female Algerian freedom fighters in the
1966 film The Battle of Algiers. They break into occupied territory of the colonizers,
in part, by wearing their oppressor's faces or the Zapatistas who hide their faces so that
they may be seen. In response to these emerging studies that link successfully determining sexual
orientation through rapid facial recognition techniques, we propose weaponizing the face
through masks. In solidarity with Anonymous, Pussy Riot, and the Zapatistas, we embrace the power
of the collective face. We make our faces common with a mask and become a faceless threat, the
queer opaque. In the tradition of collective protest actions that evade individual recognition,
like the black bloc, we have produced a collective fag face mask that offers a mutated,
alien face that cannot be read or parsed. Our fag face mask, generated from the biometric facial
data of many queer men's faces, allows you to wear the faces of many with a single mask,
while facial detection claims that a homosexual, terrorist, criminal, undocumented immigrant,
or activist can be recognized, simultaneously wearing the faces of many confuses the apparatus
and makes you unrecognizable to it. Today, in our age of informatic capture, data villains,
and recognition control, facelessness, escape, and becoming imperceptible are serious threats
to the state and capitalism. Just consider the 1845 law that was resurrected by the NYPD in
September 2011 against Occupy Wall Street that deemed two or more people wearing masks in public
illegal, unless a masquerade party was being thrown, or the mask legislation that is currently
underway in Canada. The fag face mask aims to make our faces non-existent to any available
algorithms. This non-existence produces its own autonomous visibilities and ways to find one
another. Becoming non-existent turns your face into a fog, and fog makes revolt possible.
