Niels Bonde Who’s Afraid of Face Recognition?

The artist’s interest in light and color is evident from the get-go, but the exhibition is also in many ways a logic extension of the artist’s earlier work using hacking as a strategy in the early 90s as well as his work with surveillance when it was still considered a science fiction. Now, Bonde critically examines face recognition as yet another type of surveillance through a number of pixelated, low-res images and portraits.

The technology behind face recognition is able to match a human face from a digital image or video against a database of faces, and Bonde compares this to phrenology, an influential discipline in the 19th century, in which the confirmation of the skull was believed to be indicative of specific character traits.
Not unlike the father of phrenology, Dr. Gall, scientists at the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai have recently been working on an algorithm, which they claim can, with an accuracy of 90 %, predict if a person is a convicted criminal or delinquent. This transfer of power to algorithmic judgment does not only compromise our legal rights, it has the potential to impact our lives on both a personal, social, and institutional level.

We are living in the future, in a time, where face recognition, combined with data collection and machine learning, is not only omnipresent, but has become a cyberphrenology, to which Bonde asks: Can we learn from historical precedents and extrapolate this knowledge into a prediction of the future?
And so, who wouldn’t be afraid of face recognition? There is a general trust in the objectivity of data over our own human perception. In Bonde’s work, the formal and representative aspect of the photographic image is dissolved into sensations of color, a digital impressionism, where the relationship between the color fields is so unique and precise that individuals can be classified based on very little information.

Niels Bonde (b. 1961) is an early proponent of digital art in Denmark. His works explore what electronic and in particular digital media means to our culture and shapes us. Bonde’s work has been shown in numerous in museums and galleries, including SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark,  MIT List Visual Arts Center, ZKM Karlsruhe, Stedelijk Museum, PS1 MoMa New York, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Malmö Art Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others. Bonde studied at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Copenhagen and at Institut für Neue Medien at Städelschule Frankfurt. He was Assistant professor at Malmö Art Academy Sweden from 1999 till 2005 and is currently a PhD fellow at Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna.