Public 60 2020 Biometrics: Mediating Bodies

Editors: ALEKSANDRA KAMINSKA and DAVID GRONDIN This issue of PUBLIC maps out some of the ways that bodies have been measured and identified based on biometrics ever since the rise of media technologies, from nineteenth century anthropometry to modern day computational science. From case studies and interventions detailing the history and politics of biometrics, to creative and critical applications and visualizations of the biometric body, the authors and artists included here work across diverse theoretical approaches and disciplinary traditions to engage the machine-readable body. The contributions are organized around five conversations—Histories of Measurement; Politics and Governance; Aesthetics; Narratives and Experiences; and Design—that reflect the reach of biometrics today. On the one hand, they consider the quantified and objectified body as it becomes part of systems of identification and recognition, such as in contexts of security or surveillance. On the other, they highlight the new narratives, aesthetics, and experiential mediations of the body that surface in fields like health, cinema, media art, and curation. Along the way, these articles take on biometric technologies through a variety of questions and angles, including those of standardization and normalization, identification, infrastructures, verification protocols, and algorithmic methods, but also perspectives centred on the representations, renderings, imaginings, and experiences of measured and monitored bodies.