Flexible Faces (The History, Software, and Politics of Facial Recognition)

From nineteenth-century scientific efforts to measure and classify faces to the personalized technology that unlocks your smartphone, facial recognition has reinvented itself, insinuating its logic into the fabric of everyday life. Facial recognition technologies (FRTs) have become ubiquitous through integration with computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Yet the significance of facial recognition is not its technical prowess, Aaron Tucker argues, but its persistent political project: the sustained desire to render all subjects legible to the state – a drive foundational to its history as a technology of power. Looking back at Francis Galton’s work on vision and eugenics, Woodrow W. “Woody” Bledsoe’s 1960s experiments in automated facial recognition, and the first public demonstration in 1970, Tucker traces how FRTs emerged from the convergence of photography, identity documentation, and computer vision. Accelerated by crises such as 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic, contemporary FRTs are shaped by eugenic logic and embedded in broader strategies for managing mass mobility. Tucker imagines alternative trajectories to a technology that feels ever more ubiquitous and unavoidable, including tactics that resist, disrupt, and redirect the future development of FRTs as tools of algorithmic oppression and control.

Timely and urgent, Flexible Faces reckons with two centuries of the amorphous and adaptable nature of automated facial recognition, a technology whose systems and software now slip across borders and are interwoven into one’s everyday life, mobility, and citizenship.