The fAIces project explores facial recognition through five interconnected subprojects, each centred on a community deeply entangled in its development, use, or critique. Together, they offer a multifaceted view of what it means to be seen, sorted, and sometimes resisted.
1. Scientists: Producing Knowledge, Negotiating Power
This subproject focuses on researchers developing the AI systems behind facial recognition. It examines how scientific legitimacy is established and how ethical concerns are addressed within research practices. It explores how scientific knowledge is shaped by power relations, legitimacy struggles, and situated ethics — embedded in everyday practices, institutions, and epistemic cultures.
2. Start-ups & Tech Companies: Turning Code into Products
Facial recognition becomes real in the hands of entrepreneurs and tech companies, bringing it to market. This subproject investigates how these professionals imagine the future of the technology, and what values — commercial or otherwise — guide their decisions. It traces how innovation, profit, and anticipation shape the direction of facial recognition.
3. Advocacy & Activism: Voices of Resistance
Across the world, advocacy groups and activists are challenging how facial recognition is used — and what it means. This subproject explores the critiques and alternatives being voiced, the implications of taking a public stand against these technologies, and the futures activists hope for. It listens to resistance — as strategy, as care, and as imagination.
4. Black Communities: Experiences of Surveillance and Resistance
Facial recognition technologies have disproportionately impacted Black communities — often through misidentification, over-surveillance, and systemic bias. This subproject investigates how these technologies are experienced, challenged, and reimagined, what forms of profiling and control are at work, and how they are resisted, and what hopes, critiques, and strategies emerge from within Black communities. Spanning Brazil, Canada, France, and the U.S., it centres Black voices in confronting the racial politics of facial recognition.
5. Artists: Re-Imagining the Face
Artists are experimenting with facial recognition — sometimes embracing, sometimes disrupting, but always questioning. This subproject examines how artistic practices reveal new ways of seeing and what art makes possible in the face of surveillance. It follows creative engagements that blur boundaries between critique, creativity, and activism.