Transhuman Faces in the Transurban City: Facial Recognition, Identity, Resistance

Abstract

Images of Hong Kong protestors tearing down facial recognition towers to avoid being identified by the authorities started circulating online in September 2019, quickly becoming a symbol of the technological dimension of contemporary struggles against power. While, on the one hand, devices aiming at dissimulating faces from facial recognition systems are multiplying, on the other the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed surgical masks into some mainstream garment. Within the framework of transurbanism, the present paper aims at exploring the complex relations between faces, technology, and urban spaces with transhuman technologies and smart cities. Such relations highlight several key junctions: issues of identity and self-expression, problems of surveillance and strategies of resistance, semiospheric changes, and new frontiers for the writing and creation of the face.