STS栏目·全球科技与社会| 牛津何依霖：面部识别技术与当代中国艺术摄影

“科技、社会与文化”讲座系列 5

面部识别技术与当代中国艺术摄影

Sketching from Life? Facial Recognition Technologies and Art Photography in China

日期：2023年10月4日（星期三）

时间：下午 5:00-6:30（香港时区）/ 上午10:00-11:30（英国夏令时间）

主讲人：Margaret Hillenbrand（牛津大学中国现代文学及文化教授）

讲座语言：英语

讲座摘要

This talk explores the relationship between facial recognition technologies and contemporary Chinese visual culture. Its point of departure is a recent biometric algorithm developed by a team of computer scientists based in China, a program capable of generating highly plausible photographic headshots from rough-and-ready freehand sketches of the human face. The implications of a machine learning tool such as this – which has clear utility for law enforcement – are many and deep. The paper maps out this terrain, highlighting the relationship between composite photography and criminology. 

My core focus, though, is the close but often hidden relationship between facial recognition technologies and art-making. To explore this submerged linkage, the talk turns to the work of the Chinese photographer Zhang Wei, an artist who has worked extensively with composite images. Zhang’s work holds up a mirror to the use of such images within the AI realm, and his oeuvre and the algorithm together illuminate the generative interface between facial recognition technologies and experimental art photography. Ultimately, these parallels are worthy of attention because they show that many facial recognition technologies are themselves forms of visual media. They are interventions in the domain of policing and control which borrow from pictorial traditions of portraiture, old and new. This recourse to art, the disdained domain of subjectivity, within the supposedly scientific field of facial algorithms shakes the latter’s foundational myth: namely, that our identity is genomically predetermined in ways which only the most objective methods can disclose. 

主讲人简介

Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on literary and visual studies in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and her books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020), and On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023).

参与方式

本次讲座将通过Zoom会议进行线上直播。

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https://polyu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMudeGuqjsuE9MGeUb0DIYzPE1w3Bh0NFSu

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