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Paper short abstract

This paper examines artworks engaging AI biometrics as hybrid epistemic objects, turning machinic visibility into biographically authored exposure - intentional, and negotiated, not merely extractive or imposed. It reworks how biometric seeing is staged, shifting the terms of being seen and by whom.

Paper long abstract

Artistic engagements with biometric surveillance have largely been examined through the lens of resistance and evasion. This focus corresponds to a dominant artistic repertoire that seeks to disrupt or escape machinic recognition. This paper proposes a different reading. Rather than resisting machinic visibility, certain contemporary artworks reconfigure these technologies into a site of biographically authored exposure. I argue that these works function as hybrid epistemic objects that redistribute expertise and intervene in how truth claims about biometric identity are produced.

Using a non-oppositional STS lens on human–machinic vision engagements (de Vries 2017; Lee-Morrison 2019), I examine two projects — “Self Portrait from Surveillance Camera” by Irene Fenara and “Gram’s Faces” by Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Selected as critical cases, not representative samples, within a wider mapped corpus of 160 artworks, these works repurpose AI-based biometric technologies not to escape them, but to author forms of biographical presence through them. Within these human–machine–space assemblages, exposure becomes intentional, situated, and negotiated.

By analysing artworks and artists’ statements, I show how these technologies are transformed from instruments of capture into epistemic devices for producing situated truths about lived biography. In doing so, these works challenge understandings of algorithmic biometrics as purely extractive or imposed, instead demonstrating how aesthetic practices can reclaim and redistribute the authority to make claims about biometric vision and identity. By framing these artworks as hybrid epistemic interventions, the paper shows how artistic exposure reworks how biometric seeing is staged, shifting the terms of being seen and by whom.