Queory

Queory

15 October 2015

Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK | Website

Zach Blas, Queory, University of Sussex

This talk will focus on a developing concept, ‘informatic opacity’, and masked protest as means of defeating surveillance technologies. ‘Informatic opacity’ is an aesthetico-political practice that resists emerging modes of digital capture (such as biometric recognition) and insists on an embodied dimension of life that cannot be fully abstracted by technical processes of calculation and visualisation. Through engaging with Eduoard Glissant’s writings on opacity and transparency, Blas uses his own artwork Facial Weaponisation Suite, a community-based mask-making project that creates ‘collective masks’ for public intervention. These masks elude recognition by facial detection technologies, responding to the pressures of surveillance and resistance.

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