The body is a battleground. The last stronghold of a person’s inalienable property, the body is now the target of biotechnological disputes that bring computation down to the individual’s molecular level.
In Stranger Visions (2012), artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg makes sculptures based on genetic profiles traced in material collected on the streets
Forget the days when you feared having your taxpayer ID, credit card, or personal data tracked, hacked, or cloned simply because you had shared them in some way online. Mark my words: you will miss the time when an invasion of privacy meant manipulating information about you. Now the information comes from you, from your body, and is computationally encoded to be combined with other information enabling more precise control and surveillance.
Iris scanning, for example, maps rings and spots in the eyeball. The mathematical representation of this scan is stored in a database, making it possible to identify an individual within seconds and cross-reference the information with other data. As we know, eyes do not lie. What is not always known, however, is that this type of biometric analysis is often associated with commercial applications and procedures that go far beyond security and public health. Optical scanning systems can instantly reveal drug and alcohol use, pregnancy, and diseases such as diabetes in a single click, dispensing with procedures considered invasive. But they can be—and increasingly are—linked to commercial applications such as employee monitoring and banking transactions.
Patented and monopolized by companies, the algorithms associated with this technology become an entanglement of public power, corporate power, and individuals’ sovereignty over their own bodies. The work of American artist Barbara Kruger, from whom we borrow the title of these pages, suddenly takes on new relevance. Dismembered into innumerable proprietary algorithms, the body, that last stronghold of a person’s inalienable property, is now the great prize in dispute in a new biopolitical territory.
New biopolitics
A term central to the thought of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), biopolitics is a system of power associated with the emergence of the capitalist economy. Against the backdrop of ever-increasing production in the mid-nineteenth century came a need to control and monitor the population through statistics on births, deaths, and migration, and through strategies for normalizing sexual and labor practices, such as sex for reproductive purposes, assembly-line production, and shift work, among others. These technologies have become far more sophisticated since the closing decades of the twentieth century. “Today’s parameters not only make it possible to identify an individual and compile a database, but also to verify that identity and trace a historical profile of their actions. Instead of a physical archive of cranial measurements and composite sketches on paper, we now deal with a digital database that compares, in real time, information collected by webcams installed in urban space with physiological information also stored in a database,” says Brazilian researcher Fernanda Duarte, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina in the United States whose work focuses on contemporary biotechnologies.
The researcher also warns that two fundamental aspects of biotechnological development must be considered in relation to monitoring. On the one hand, we must remember that, beyond biometrics itself, other methods for monitoring the body—microchips, implantable RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags, nanorobots, and biosynthetic proteins that collect data on molecular physiology—are increasingly promising areas of research. On the other, various forms of wearable computing and cameras, such as Google Glass, suggest that we are volunteering for consensual and lateral forms of surveillance, involving the sharing of data linked to gestures and personal histories over which we have no control or even awareness.
Monitoring through biosensors
Although largely experimental or restricted to military use and advanced medical research centers, a number of biotechnological devices are networked and available to the public. The popularity of health-related apps for the iPhone and similar devices is evidence of this. One, called MIKAT, for example, uses a biosensor to let patients monitor their anxiety levels to prevent them from developing into a panic attack. Using skin sensors and heart-rate monitoring, the app reports information about patients’ emotional state and provides exercises and clinical techniques based on cognitive behavioral therapy. If physiological monitoring indicates a panic attack, the data are automatically sent to the attending physician, who can then take the necessary steps to care for the patient. “Embedding computation in the human body provides more precise information not only about the body’s performance but also about its location in physical space. You can choose not to share your location when accessing a website, or turn off your phone if you do not want to be disturbed, but you cannot turn off your body. If pervasive computing reaches a level of intimacy with the human body at which contamination occurs and bodies are ‘naturally’ hacked, sharing physiological data will become inevitable,” Duarte comments.
At a moment when the world is learning about Prism, the American electronic surveillance system, and how it feeds on data stored by popular services such as Google and Facebook, this prognosis suggests that such intimate, private information might one day also “leak” from corporate to government bodies, and vice versa. That should be enough to worry even the most thoroughly psychoanalyzed person on Earth. To reassure us—or drive us completely to distraction—it is important to make clear that these biotechnological systems are sophisticated but not perfect. Especially because they can fail when confronting social otherness.
Colombian artist and researcher Micha Cardenas, who lives in the United States and is transgender, commented at a recent conference in Canada that three-dimensional body scanning at American airports left people like her completely vulnerable. The system, including the security officer responsible for checking the images, simply freezes. It fails to recognize a body outside the norm and automatically directs the person to a physical search. As Duarte points out, it is paradoxical, to say the least, that a body connected to a network by a biotechnological device should be subject to such extreme pervasiveness, while the very connection that identifies the biological body’s appearance cannot reveal its ubiquitous condition, irreducible to absolute models of male or female.
Certainly, beyond all the advances still to come in health and other fields, the age of biotechnological surveillance raises the prospect of new policies of control and mobility. Under unprecedented parameters, they scramble the boundaries between public and private, corporate and governmental, machines and human beings. And this era is only beginning.
Article originally published in seLecT, 13, August/September 2013, pp. 52–55