Facial Recognition Technologies (FRTs) have emerged as the key biometric for automating processes of identification within thecontemporary state. Military-industrial FRT research is fixated upon the problematic of illegibility, which it operationalises as a way of developing the emergent potential of the biometric apparatus. In particular, the face of the child and that of the corpse have been taken up by researchers as exemplars of the confounding mutability of the face as vital phenomena. The growth of the child demands a technical simulation of its unruly becoming; the decomposition of the corpse necessitates the modelling of organic decay. The child then is too lively, and the corpse too undead, for FRT to easily model. But the ‘failure’ of the child and the corpse to grow and to rest in the expected or desired way means that they are highly productive in expanding FRT’s horizon of technical experimentation and possibility. In this paper I will consider how this modelling of the face of the child and the face of the corpse enframes ‘life-death’ within a new iteration of the biopolitical order. I argue that military-industrial researchers exploit the illegibility of the face in a productive dialectic which thrives upon the ambivalence of the vital-mortal body in order to legitimise and expand the operation of the biometric apparatus.
Bio:
Dr Christopher O’Neill is a Deakin University Postdoctoral University Researcher at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation (Australia) and a 2025-2026 Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Southern California. His work considers the way that ‘the human’ is being refigured within contemporary automated technologies, amidst a new iteration of the biopolitical order.
