#simonebrowne

[blacklifescience]

For example, Canada's Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, building a nation states, 'We start with the use of photo identification, proposed as a security feature for the new card. The first thing to note is that human beings are not particularly acute at recognizing individuals from photograph identification, particularly across cultural lines. Moreover, glasses, hairstyles and (for men) facial hair may change, which may lead to questions even when the holder of the card is genuine" It is interesting to note here that biometric identifiers are suggested by the committee as a means to solve detection problems resulting from human beings Mac of ability to recognize individuals from photographs. I argue that what is suggested here is that digitized body data can be a technology to secure accurate and, presumably, fixed race and gender detection. Moreover in this system it is apparently understood that only men have facial hair

Footnote 88 (Simone Browne, Dark Matters pg. 181

-MS

[blacklifescience]

Simone Browne addresses the Hewlett-Packard (HP) face-tracking camera that correctly identifies a white woman but fails to detect the face of her black coworker. You see in this video that Wanda, the white coworker is immediately recognized and the computer begins to work, but as soon as Dessi, her black coworker, enters the frame, the computer fails to recognize him. This denial of black people while simultaneously surveilling them is a parallel that brings so many questions to the forefront. Like, in what settings are recognizing blackness or black bodies acceptable? When we are in battle like the United States Colored Troops (USCT)? When we show up in predominately white spaces? What about when we exist in our own spaces (referring back to the police officer invading a marginalized school)? 

[blacklifescience]

Dark Surveillance

Dark surveillance refers to "the tactics employed to render one's self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessary ones of under sight... Dark surveillance is a site of critique, as it speaks to black epistemologies of contending with antiblack surveillance" ( Browne p. 21).

[blacklifescience]

“Some of these laws spoke explicitly to the notion of a visual surplus and the regulation of mobility by way of the candle lantern. In March 1713, the Common Council of New York City passed a “Law for Regulating Negro & Indian Slaves in the Nighttime” that declared, “no Negro or Indian Slave above the age of fourteen years do presume to be or appear in any of the streets” of New York City “on the south side of the fresh water in the night time above one hour after sun sett without a lanthorn and a lighted candle. (Browne p.78)”

- Dark Matters by Simone Browne

[blacklifescience]

"Wilson Chinn marks the circulation of the nineteenth-century photo- graphic archive of slave branding and, in some ways, the ex-slave carte de visite photographs, along with other slavery ephemera, are the contemporary instantiations of the auction block. These artifacts live on as heirlooms on the Internet." - Browne, 103

Image: https://blackthen.com/branding-of-slaves-brutal-act-used-for-identification-purposes-and-severe-punishment/

[elisembia]

#Repost @kadistkadist with @get_repost ・・・ CBT™: Who owns your data? Reverse negative patterns. Secure your data profile.🔒 Dr. Simone Browne shows how black and marginalised subjects are at greater risk of data exploration by revealing the link between biometrics and criminalisation. Contemporary surveillance methods continue colonial logic... See story for more details. #KOutOfOffice #SimoneBrowne #mozilla (à Kadist Art Fondation)