Critical Surveillance Art in the Age of Machine Vision and Algorithmic Governmentality: Three Case Studies

This article explores the political dimension of three surveillance artworks: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Level of Confidence (2015), Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Probably Chelsea (2017), and Trevor Paglen’s Machine Readable Hito (2017). These three artworks deploy new technologies of machine vision and algorithmic face recognition in order to develop a critical account of surveillance. This article’s main hypothesis is that the critical potential of the three selected artworks stems from their ability to render visible a twofold tension that defines contemporary social formations. First, these works nurture a certain ambiguity between two modes of understanding the relation between images and power (representation and performativity), highlighting the difficulties in conceptualising and redefining new critical strategies for artists today. Second, this article highlights the tension between individualisation and personalisation as two parallel tendencies of contemporary power. In this context, the modern notion of political emancipation, grounded mainly on the figure of the individual subject, has to be called into question. The three selected artworks point out the intersection between two logics of power (discipline and governmentality), drawing attention to the limits of the notion of emancipation for a critique of algorithmic face recognition technologies.