
Sadly, the people who feel the brunt of this insidious gaze aren't only criminals; minority groups and activists are also subjected to this oppressive watching. Security cameras, aerial surveillance, larger police presences, warrantless surveillance, border checks, stop and frisks, and more are all commonplace in certain regions or populations in this country. It's no wonder that even before Snowden, many activists had adopted protest masks as part of their toolbox of political action. Pussy Riot, black blocs, the Zapatistas, Anonymous, and more have taken the mask as a tool to hide and also a means to self-empower.In 2011, taken by the emergence of mass protest movements around the world, artist Zach Blas began making his "Facial Weaponization Suite," a series of community workshops that discuss and resist biometric facial recognition technologies and the larger political ethos that supports and enforces them. The workshop participants then have their own faces scanned and compiled into a collective mask, a mask which resists any biometric quantification. I got Blas on the phone to learn a little more about the project.VICE: The algorithmic gaze of the surveillance apparatus is binary-literally ones and zeros-but also in terms of its treatment of human beings as binary. We are seen as either terrorist or not, posing a threat or not, gay or not. What's at stake if this type of machine logic completely permeates our society?
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