JESSIE ROBERTSON // How not to be seen: the political aesthetics of opacity, 2011-2014

Blas’s concept of informatic opacity builds on these ideas and was formulated during his work on Fag Face, the first mask of the Facial Weaponization Suite series, which was inspired by the use of facial recog­nition technologies to determine sexual orientation (Fig. 4). The work was triggered by a 2008 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which tested people’s ability to identify homosexual men from photos of their faces. Blas argues that studies like this one endorse LGBTIQ stereotyping and promote a visibility that ‘attempt[s] to control, monitor and police’.¹⁵ In reaction to this stereotyping of homosexual facial qualities, Blas’s Fag Face asks:¹⁶

Rather than engage in the activist tactic of gaining visibility through recognition, Fag Face identifies with a queer politics of the non-recog­nisable, a politics of escape that is ‘anti-state and anti-recognition’. This politics of ‘escape’, Blas asserts, expresses a desire to exit current regimes of control and to cultivate forms of living otherwise.¹⁷

This politics of escape translates through Blas’s aggregated data masks as a weaponising of the face. By wearing the Fag Face mask, gen­erated from the biometric data of many queer men’s faces, participants become what he terms: a ‘faceless threat’, ‘the queer opaque’. The Fag Face mask is a mutated face, which cannot be read or parsed by algorith­mic technologies. This collective face makes the wearer unrecognisable and therefore uncatagorisable to facial recognition technologies, which claim to identify the faces of terrorists, activists, homosexuals or undocu­mented immigrants. The wearer of the mask is still physically present, they have not hidden or disappeared, but their facial data – what makes them readable and transparent – is cloaked.

The paradigm of transparency versus opacity on which Blas draws is, however, riddled with complexities and tension. A major dif­ficulty is that we have been encouraged to understand visibility as a con­dition of freedom. In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler explains that within our standard frameworks for considering humanisation, there is a general assumption that ‘those who gain representation, especially self-representation, have a better chance of being humanized’, whilst those who ‘have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human, regarded less than human, or indeed not regarded at all’.¹⁸ The idea of visibility as a humanizing concept is particularly challenging for refugees, undocumented migrants and those within the prison system who are denied visibility and hidden from public view. Those without visibility have no means of gaining repre­sentation and therefore the majority are forgotten by society, reduced to faceless numbers within an over-crowded system.

Mass data surveillance has problematized the widely-held asser­tion that visibility brings freedom, because now we are acutely aware that our supposed ‘freedom’ in fact comes at the cost of our privacy and this is encouraging those with the means and knowledge to choose an aesthetics of invisibility. But there is a clear paradox at play in this shift toward opacity. Although the rejection of visibility, despite its humanizing qualities, in favour of non-visibility is a radical refusal of state and corporate surveillance, it is not one that is available to all. In order to choose opacity, you must already possess a certain level of visibility. Prisoners, the homeless and undocumented migrants (to name just a few) are unseen, they have no opportunity for self-representation – their invisibility is forced upon them.

Enacting Opacity

The questions of privilege that surround this shift towards opacity and the art world’s increasing interest in privacy and surveillance have not bypassed Hito Steyerl, whose spoof instructional video How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Education .MOV File (2013) playfully considers our various options for invisibility (Fig. 5). The work is, in part, a continuation of Steyerl’s work on image proliferation and her now famous article ‘In Defence of the Poor Image’ (2009), but the focus shifts in How Not to be Seen, as the instructional video lays out the low-resolution image as space in which to become ‘less visible, or more ambiguously figured’.¹⁹ The idea of image resolution as a space to become less visible is inspired by abandoned aerial photo calibration targets in the Californian desert, which were originally used in the 1960s and 1970s to test the resolution of airborne cameras. Much of the video is filmed on location at one of these sites, and the instructional video is interspersed with information about these targets and the new pixel-based standards of resolution introduced in 2000, which rendered the grey scale photo calibration targets redundant. The video’s automated voiceover asserts that resolution determines visibility: it calibrates the world as a picture.

The veil also appears as a tool for opacity and invisibility in Adam Harvey’s collection of Stealth Wear (2013), a set of garments that render the wearer undetectable to thermal imaging from drone surveil­lance. The collection includes an anti-drone cap and hoodie as well an anti-drone hijab and burka (Fig. 8). The pieces are made out of light-weight nylon, using a silver coating to reflect the wearer’s thermal body heat and conceal him or her from the view of drones. Harvey’s Stealth Wear is directly inspired by the burka and the hijab, veils which partially or totally cover the wearer’s face and body. Harvey contends that if cer­tain religious dress employs face covering, then why cannot similar ideas be employed as a means of counter-surveillance?³⁵ The drone, he suggests, has taken on a God-like, all-seeing presence in the skies, and the Stealth Wear garments are an attempt to deflect this all-seeing presence, protecting the wearer’s face and modesty from its view.³⁶

Steyerl and Harvey’s use of the veil as a tactic of non-existence is not incidental. Its cultural and political symbolism has been particularly contentious since 9/11, with the veil and its wearers becoming the targets of sweeping generalisations, racial bias and heightened surveillance in the western world. Although Islamophobia has heightened in the wake of the September 11 attacks, western misgivings and misderstandings surrounding the veil are deeply rooted in colonial history.

In the 1986 essay ‘Under Western Eyes’, Chandra Mohanty highlights and calls into question a common generalisation within strands of western feminism which links the practice of veiling to the ‘assertion of its general significance in controlling women’. Mohanty points out that while there may be formal similarities in the veils worn by women in Saudi Arabia and Iran, for example, the ‘specific meaning’ attached to the practice of veiling varies heavily according to the cultural and ideological context.³⁷

Mohanty gives the contrasting examples of Iranian middle class women veiling themselves during the 1979 revolution in solidarity with veiled working-class Iranian women and in opposition to western cultural colonisation, and the mandatory Islamic laws in place in Iran at the time of her writing in 1986, which dictated that all Iranian women wear veils as part of the ‘true Islamicization of Iran’. The meaning attached to the veil is clearly very different in each of these historical contexts; the first is a revolutionary gesture, while the second is a ‘coercive, institutional mandate’. The western assumption that the practice of veiling is indicative of the ‘universal oppression of women through sexual segregation’ is, Mohanty argues, not only wholly reductive, but also denies the complexities of meaning that the veil holds within different contexts.³⁸

Deepa Kumar agrees with Mohanty’s assertions in the 2012 publication Islamaphobia and the Politics of Empire, stating that the Islamic veil is ‘seen ubiquitously as a symbol of Muslim women’s oppression’ with ‘the logic that Muslim women are oppressed and therefore need to be rescued by the West’ continuing to hold ground post 9/11.³⁹ Conspicuously absent from this veil/oppression discourse, as Kumar shrewdly points out, ‘are the voices of Muslim women themselves, who could construct an alternative narrative – one which speaks to a self-conscious choice made by autonomous individuals’.

Such a move, Kumar asserts, would ‘entail a shift in terms of discussion: instead of being portrayed as voiceless victims, Muslim women would need to become actors capable of changing their own circumstances’.⁴⁰ Although the alignment of the veil with female oppression is a recurrent theme within western discussions of Islam – heightened by the strict rule of the Taliban in Iraq and the rapid rise of Islamic State across Syria and Afghanistan in which the wearing of the veil is enforced – the controversy surrounding veiling in western countries is also steeped in the growing obsession with transparency and visibility.⁴¹ The veil is perceived as a threat because it hides the face, and therefore the visible identity of the wearer, rendering them unreadable to both surveillance cameras and humans. This perceived threat of the veiled, covered face to western culture was cemented by law in 2011 when it became illegal for women in France to wear the veil outside their homes, under a law which banned the total covering of the face and body in public. Belgium and parts of Italy passed similar laws banning full face covering in public in 2011, and at the beginning of 2015 Chinese authorities banned women in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang in which almost half of the population is Muslim, from wearing burkas, or rather 蒙面罩袍, which translates literally as ‘face-masking robes’.⁴²

Visibility is promoted by the west as a symbol of ‘freedom’ and so it is unsurprising that the non-visible, partially or totally covered faces of women in the Middle East have come to be perceived by the western media as oppressed, controlled and without a voice. As we have seen however, the bared, visible face is not quite as ‘free’ and ‘humanized’ as we have been led to believe. In the age of mass surveillance, a visible face is a biometrically detectable and readable face, which – although we remain free and are encouraged to bare – is one that is captured multiple times each day by cameras and carries a plethora of personal details and data. Instead of being oppressed and masked by the burka or hijab, west­ern subjects must come to terms with the veil of surveillance that now enshrouds us. This makes both Steyerl and Harvey’s choice of the veil as both a symbol and a practical device for counter-surveillance and opac­ity all the more interesting and begs the question: what are the implica­tions of these (western) artists co-opting the veil, a religious and cultural object with such nuanced, complex and often misread symbolism?

First it is worth considering how Steyerl and Harvey simulta­neously uphold and cast into doubt the heavily gendered history and symbolism of the veil and how the veil is perceived in a western con­text. Harvey’s anti-drone hijab and anti-drone burka do clearly maintain their gendered association. Although designed in a gender-neutral silver colour and heavily modernized – the burka has a zip down the front and a peaked cap – both items are modeled on the Stealth Wear website by a female while the anti-drone hoodie is shown on both male and female models. Designed to be functional and wearable, both are clearly targeted at female wearers and buyers, and seem to uphold the veil as a feminine item of clothing. However, as seen from above on a ther­mal imaging camera, the gender of the wearer is obscured by both the burka and hijab, with only a pair of legs visible under the dark cloak of reflected body heat.

Similarly, on seeing the dancing veiled figures in How Not to Be Seen, the assumption is immediately that these figures are female. This assumption is upheld by the other figures that appear in the video that are clearly gendered, despite their only partial visibility. However, on second glance the gender of the dancing veiled figures becomes less clear. Because we cannot see the figure underneath, the burka leads us to assume their femininity. But in this playful spoof instructional video we can be sure of nothing. This sense of ambiguity is heightened when one of the figures casts off their burka to reveal not their identity but a full body morph suit. The figure now appears to be male, but with the morph suite covering the figure’s face, we cannot be totally sure. The burkas cast an intentional ambiguity over the figures, refusing to reveal their gender, age or ethnicity.

The use of such a culturally and politically loaded garment as a means of refusing state visibility by these artists directly confronts the image of the veil as a symbol of oppression that has been so carefully cultivated in the western world and in some contexts confirmed and perpetuated by recent Islamic extremism in parts of the Middle East. Harvey’s anti-drone burkas and hijabs, along with Steyerl’s dancing burka-clad figures contest the conventional western notion that a bared face is a free, ‘humanized’ face. Each of these works appropriates and re-casts the veil – whose wearer is often the victim of racially profiled surveillance under the umbrella of anti-terror initiatives – reframing it as an object of sousveillance.

It is important to acknowledge that in the west the veil, in a similar way to the racially biased biometric negation of blackness, concurrently renders the wearer’s face unreadable, or at least partially obscured, while identifying it as a heightened target for surveillance. It must be considered, then, that although these works utilize the veil in a highly politicized way and highlight the heavily generalized notion of ‘non-visibility = oppression’ that the veil has come to represent for many in the west, they do not seem to fully account for, or take into consideration, the extensive complexities of the veil in its various forms and the women who chose (or who have no choice but to) wear it.

Falsified Faces

The banning of the veil in some countries and the more widespread state banning of masks suggest the perceived threat of ‘facelessness’ and serve to complicate the wearability of Blas and Harvey’s artistic interventions of masking and facial opacity. Leonardo Selvaggio’s project URME (2014) attempts to navigate this issue of legality by creating a mask that is in fact a fully ‘readable’ face, visible only as a mask on close inspection. Inspired heavily by both Blas’s masks and Harvey’s CV Dazzle (2010), a hair and make up system devised to evade facial recognition technolo­gies, URME is a 3-D printed resin mask, created from a 3-D scan and photo rendering of the artist’s own face. Selvaggio argues that while Blas and Harvey’s projects render the face unreadable to machines, they fail to acknowledge the social aspect of surveillance in their work and do not take into account the issue of human to human surveillance, which has not only become prevalent, but actively encouraged in the west particularly since 9/11, and indeed long before then.⁴³ Alongside this, while the Facial Weaponization Suite masks actively draw attention to the wearer, promoting a very visible refusal of biometric surveillance and machine readability, the URME mask is in fact detected by surveillance cameras as a fully readable human face rather than a mask.

The idea behind the work is that rather than hide our faces, we should substitute them with the faces of others, blurring and confusing identities, in order to protect ourselves from surveillance. This blurring of identities and physical features has obvious legal and social conse­quences, which is why, for the time being, the only face available on URME is the artist’s own. While the long-term goal of the project is to develop a database of people willing to share their face with others, the project is currently limited to just one face. URME invites members of the public to assume Selvaggio’s identity, either by wearing the 3-D printed mask or the cheaper, more disposable paper alternative.

Selvaggio labels the URME masks as ‘products for the public good’.⁴⁴ He is quick to point out that the ‘products’ are not sold for profit, but rather at cost price; although the 3-D printed resin mask, priced at $300, is too expensive for many, the paper mask costs just $1 and can also be downloaded, printed and assembled free of charge. The project therefore aligns itself conspicuously with socially engaged prac­tice, rather than marketable fine art objects and is intended to make the avoidance of biometric facial surveillance accessible to all, regardless of their wealth or technical knowledge. It is therefore, immediately acces­sible to a wide audience and does not insist on wealth as a condition of opacity – as is demonstrated in Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen.

The current singularity of the project, however, casts it in an unsettling light. It is difficult not to view the multiplication of the art­ist’s own face onto the faces of others as a somewhat narcissistic gesture, despite the artist’s intentions that the project be expanded to include other faces. But more worrying perhaps, is that by encouraging people to assume his own face, Selvaggio suggests we adopt a form of standard­ized counter-surveillance, which is exactly what Blas’s agregated data masks refuse. Although it is possible to view the mask as a revolutionary gesture of protest, in which protesters reject their own faces en masse and instead assume one united face, there is something troubling about being asked to assume the face and identity of another person, and this is only amplified when this single face and identity is adopted by many people wearing the mask simultaneously.

What is most problematic about Selvaggio’s mask is the fact that it depicts the wearer, whoever they may be, as a white male, an example of prototypical whiteness. It is difficult not to associate Selvaggio’s masks with earlier discussions of biometrics and racial bias, and more specifically Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the face as that of ‘the white man’, typically European with ‘broad white cheeks and black holes for eyes’ which Selvaggio’s project perpetuates.⁴⁵ When considered in relation to the enforced sameness and standardization created by many people assuming one face, Selvaggio’s masks come worryingly close to Deleuze and Guatarri’s conception of racism, which, they assert, does not detect the other, but rather, disseminates ‘sameness’ until those who resist identification have been wiped out.⁴⁶

This reading of Selvaggio’s work could also be applied to the look of the Vendetta mask (popularised by hacker and activist group Anonymous and prolific during the Occupy protests), which despite its revolutionary status draws parallels with the characterisation of the normative face as white and male.⁴⁷ Masks, Deleuze and Guattari contend, assure the construction of the face – the ‘facialisation of the head and body’. The mask, they argue, is now the face itself; it is the ‘inhumanity of the face’.⁴⁸ The mask, rather than becoming a place to ‘escape’ the face, has become the face. Although it hides individualising features and enables anonymity, one could argue that both the Vendetta mask and Selvaggio’s URME masks retain normative facial features, which seem to echo and reaffirm the elementary facial units of ‘prototypical whiteness’ and ‘prototypical maleness’.

Although Selvaggio’s masks are problematic, a closer reading of these white-faced masks in relation to the earlier discussion of the unreadability of blackness might intimate greater complexities around these questions of opacity, race and privilege. As we have seen, the white middle class male, although the most readable to biometric algorithms, is, in fact, least likely to be the subject of targeted surveillance. The very whiteness of Selvaggio’s masks enables the wearer to use both the biometric readability and perceived privilege that the artist’s face portrays as a space behind which to hide in plain sight. The mask perpetuates and destabilises ideas of ‘safety in whiteness’ based on the ideas of prototypical whiteness and maleness which suggest that the person least likely to be subject to surveillance is a white middle class male wearing a suit.⁴⁹

Although heavily influenced by Facial Weaponization Suite, the URME masks take a very different approach to the concept of ‘global face culture’ and the mask as an anti-biometric tool of counter-surveil­lance. Selvaggio’s project presents a real, readable face behind which the wearer can hide, while Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite insists upon the mask as an active rejection of visibility and biometric facial control. Blas’s masks are not intended to go unnoticed, they are not simple tools of counter-surveillance; rather, they are a symbol of protest. By wearing masks, Blas and his participants make their faces common and become a ‘faceless threat’.

The affordable nature of Selvaggio’s masks highlights an uncom­fortable tension apparent in Blas, Steyerl and Harvey’s work. As I have alluded to throughout this article, there appears to be a clear correlation between opacity and privilege, which arises repeatedly in the works dis­cussed. Steyerl criticizes the fact that maybe a way to become invisible is to live in a gated community, Harvey’s Stealth Wear protects you from drone surveillance at prices ranging $500–$2,300, and Blas’s weaponis­ing masks use complex biometric coding and reconfiguring as well as requiring 3-D printing technology, which are simply inaccessible to the majority of the population. Harvey, when challenged on the pricing of Stealth Wear, contends that ‘privacy is a luxury item’ and the garments, created using silver thread, are simultaneously editorial fashion pieces and counter-surveillance art objects, and should be valued and priced as such.⁵⁰ He later adds however, that although privacy is a luxury, it is one that should be afforded to all.

For the time being, however, with surveillance becoming increasingly sophisticated and widespread, the shift towards opacity remains an option for only a select few. It is the white western mid­dle class who have the means and privilege to become opaque and to hide from cameras, which is ironic because although we are all victims of mass data surveillance and biometric algorithms are coded to read whiteness and lightness, the privileged white are the people least likely to be subject to targeted surveillance. The wealth and privilege evidently required to achieve this opacity exposes an uncomfortable question: if you cannot afford the opacity laid out by Steyerl in How Not to Be Seen, do not have $2,000 to spend on an anti-drone hoodie and are not in the position to (or do not wish to) draw attention to yourself in public using CV Dazzle or wearing a Facial Weaponization Suite mask, is the affordable, white-faced mask of Selvaggio or Guy Fawkes your only option?

Although these works are not without tension and uncomfort­able paradox, the highly politicised subject of surveillance on which they draw is one that now affects us all. The shift towards opacity that these artworks explore is an important one, and by revealing and exploring the realities of mass biometric surveillance, each of the works contrib­utes to the ongoing conversation on mass surveillance. Opacity as nonexistence exposes the standardisation to which we are reduced on a daily basis and opens up the possibility for a renewed conception of collective appearance; one whose identity hinges not on the readability of the biomass, but on its faceless anonymity.