On Thursday we will discuss Hito Steyerl’s digital art project “How not to be Seen” in tandem with Simone Browne’s work “Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.” This blog post will be a little bit more open-ended.
How does the excerpt of Browne’s Dark Matters inform your interpretation of Hito Steyer’s video “How not to be Seen”? For whom can it be beneficial to not be seen and in which contexts? What is the role of gender, race, or class when it comes to aspects of visibility and surveillance? In which contexts can visibility be beneficial and for whom?
Make sure you’re your blog is about 250 words long. Your blogpost needs to comment, respond, or critically engage with your classmates’ blog entries and use examples of your own watch-experience of Hito Steyerl’s digital art. Incl. at least one quote from Simone Browne’s Dark Matters to back up your arguments.
Consider this blog to be our conversation starter. We will continue the discussion in class on Thursday!
In the first excerpt of Browne’s Dark Matters, I was able to make a few connections to Hito Steyer’s “How not to be Seen” video. One of the first ones I saw was when Steyer says to blend in with your surroundings. While social media was only brought up once in the first excerpt, Browne says that social media users actually fear this instead of using it to hide. For example, users on Instagram may feel like they are not seen by others because they don’t stand out. Their posts may be too ‘normal’ or ‘under the radar’. Browne quotes Gilliom and Monoham saying that “social media users discipline themselves in a different way by divulging as much as possible about their lives and thoughts” (Browne 39). This is well put, as it describes a typical teenagers worst fear, they are extremely normal. As said by Browne, it may be more beneficial for prisoners to actually not be seen all of the time. She states that self-harm, depression, acts of violence, passive behavior and self-mutilation “are expressions of inmates’ struggles with the panopticon” (Browne 40). For many, constant watch can drive some to act out or even experience insanity.
Browne argues that white people have a special relationship to light, or that whiteness in biometrics is privileged. While thinking in terms of science, how are we supposed to identify specific races and genders if biometrics only caters to one group? Victims of crime deserve to be identified fairly regardless of their race or gender. Browne quotes Nanavati by saying “the quality of images provided to the facial-scan system are optimized for lighter-skinned users” (Browne 113). In the context of crime, visibility can be beneficial for black women based on their position of the crime. For example, a black woman committing a crime may never be identified. Vice versus, the person or victim in which the crime was done may also never be identified if it is a black person, according to biometrics.
Just to add: It is maybe not a question of “getting away” but rather a question of the harm of misidentification. There are several cases in which for instance a black woman or man were misidentified in criminal cases. A study conduced at the University of Michigan Law by Samuel R. Gross showed that black people are more likely to be convicted of murder. The New York times has a short article written by Niraj Chokshi about the study: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/wrongful-convictions-race-exoneration.html
In Steyer’s funky art piece, she contemplates methods of not being seen. Browne’s work offers us insight as to motivations of that desire, including the threat of violence. “What Gordon insightfully calls the “notion of white prototypicality” is the enabling condition of the structured violence of “the dialectics of recognition.” As Browne asserts, surveillance can be used as a weapon, and historically has been – in applications such as stop-and-frisk. Social groups that differ from the norm are put in danger by surveillance – especially when this surveillance is backed by force, such as in the U.S policing system. This danger makes being invisible beneficial to many, a fact Steyer creatively toys with. This danger is also exacerbated by the rapid advancement of technology and biometrics which reflect and enforce the social (class, race, ect.) hierarchies of the society that created them. Browne cites a test of biometric systems – “Construction workers and artisans are more likely to have highly worn fingerprints [leading to higher FTE rates in fingerprint scans]” Here, those differing from the norm of the upper class are not treated fairly by the technology. Additionally, the biases that are embedded in biometrics are also present in everyday life as members of society watch each other, giving the power of the gaze a substantial effect on visibility. Due to biases of the watcher, a white person is considered much less suspicious in almost any activity, when compared to someone who differs from the norm doing the same thing. Visibility and surveillance automatically increase on members of excluded groups and this has very real consequences, ie higher rates of incarceration for black males. In a society where being visible can be life threatening, Steyer’s invisibility cloak seems like the way to go.
Great point pertaining to the construction workers and artisans and how they’re not treated as well as those in the upper class technology wise, I didn’t think about that aspect so thanks.
Ava presents a highly factual argument that is very prominent in our society today. Browne discusses biometrics and how the system in itself tends to favor those with lighter skin, and even provides examples of how the system will correctly gender races as their skin gets lighter. “meaning that whiteness is made
normative and, in so being, raceless, or what Goldberg terms “racially invisible” (Browne, 110). In this, it ties back to Hito Steryl whose brand for this project is of “How not to be Seen”. Gordon, in Browne’s text, quite literally confirms the fact that in a biometrical system, those who aren’t white, are less likely to be seen or recognized. This in itself, presents the psychological effects that it has on POC and how due to their race, they’re less likely to be recognized or correctly gendered.
I highly agree with Ava’s statement about how in this technical age, social media users, but specifically teenagers, desire individuality. This contradicts with Steyerl’s film about how to blend in and be invisible. To me, I think it is all about how some view surveillance, perhaps since teenagers have grown up with surveillance all around us (video cameras, “the FBI agents in our phones”, etc.) we are more desensitized to it. The desire for individuality stems from everything we’ve grown up with, different medias (TV, movies, books, etc.) always depict the underdog and the girl who isn’t like others to come out successful. Especially in social media, we view these influencers with hundreds of thousands to millions of followers, and want to be like them. For the most part, the “we” in this being the general public, most want to be seen as different and to not be associated with whatever stereotype is criticized on social media (i.e: VSCO girls in 2019, etc.)
After reading Browne’s excerpt and watching Hito Steyerl’s video I have gained a new understanding of surveillance in film and how it connects to the real world. Within the video we are guided through different lessons on ‘how not to be seen’, some of these instructions were realistic and some were sort of confusing. She also mentions “being invisible can be deadly”. I found this interesting because in some ways it ties into Browne’s work that people of color are automatically more invisible than white folk. During an experiment, two study authors, Gao and Ai concluded that “The accuracy of gender classifier on Africans is not as high as on Mongoloid and Caucasoid” (Browne 111). This explains that it is harder to identify sex of those with African decent. Which is so wrong in so many ways. Connecting to what Ava said, I agree with her point that biometrics only cater to one group and I would also like to add that we are seeing this today in the real world. Violence is a hot topic today especially pertaining to race and police brutality. Connecting to race, a white person is automatically less serveilled in public giving them the advantage compared to a minority group individual. I partially agree and partially disagree with Steyerl’s quote from above. I feel as though if a person is in a social group they/ their group is/are at risk of being surveilled. More than if it was one individual.
The short documentary by Hito Steyerl titled How Not to Be Seen relates to the excerpt by Simon Brown because it is about how certain people are not seen by the camera more naturally than others. This can have its benefits if one likes to hide from an authority, but largely is discriminatory. From the excerpt, Darkness Matters the role of gender, race, or class is an important determining factor of how security cameras depict who you are. I think that this has to do with lighting and who is in the fields of technology. I believe that this is because the majority of people involved in the technical fields are either white in America and Europe, or Asian in Asia therefore the people who developed this technology want to make it work for the majority populace of their country. An example of from darkness matters Browne says “Interestingly, when their gender classifier was made “ethnically specific” for the category “African,” they found that images of African females would be classified as females about 82% of the time, while the same African classifier would find images of “Mongoloid” females to be female 95.5 percent of the time…” This is from the developers’ biases. I also think that this largely in part has to do with majority-minority schools getting less funding and those students having lesser opportunities, leading to fewer diversity in countries that largely produce these technologies. I agree with poteetkm that this can also be abused by the police. The majority of celebrities in America are Caucasian and this is a large factor in their success because they are more easily recognized whereas someone of minority decent could be just as talented or even more so and doesn’t get the recognition purely based on race.
in Hito Steyer’s video, “How not to be seen”, gave us more information on methods of not being seen. Like Ava said in Dark Matters, Browne mentioned that social media users fear this instead of using it to hide. I also liked how she included her example explaining how young adults think that no one is watching them on social media because they’re not getting a lot of likes or view because they think they are “ too normal”. Now in days we look up to all these young influencers that have over thousands of followers and likes on their post, “we” as a whole look up to them and want to be like them. Our generation grew up with so much technology around and a lot of us don’t know that majority of the time we are being watch. Me personally I didn’t know much of surveillance because at first I was like “oh there’s cameras, someone is watching” till now that we have got deeper into the conversation of surveillance and now I’m like “ wow we’re really being watched 24/7.” Browne also said that the system itself tends to favor those with lighter skin. “White-ness is made normative” so basically is saying that if you’re a different color other than white, you probably won’t be seen or recognized at all. I still see this going on today because there’s not one day on social media that I see a post with a caption, for example, that where color people or different race mentions how successful they can be as well because they feel like they are not getting enough recognition for their hard work.
I noticed a few connections between the Browne’s “Dark Matters” and Steyerl’s “How Not to be Seen.” At one moment in the video, Steyerl points out that a trick to be invisible is to “blend in with your surroundings,” which, as Ava stated, aligns with the observations made by Browne that white people have privilege in biometrics because the system itself is calibrated to better identify white people. This idea is cemented by Browne’s statements regarding “those deemed ‘dangerous minorities’” (Browne 38), as these “minorities,” which are often characterized by physical differences such as race and gender, seem to stand out more, hence being more subject to surveillance or to be considered dangerous due to prejudices.
Another connection between the two works regarding surveillance methods and differences in those who are surveyed is the concept of older people, specifically women. Steyerl mentions one of the tricks to being invisible is to “be a woman over 50,” which by itself sounds like a funny little comment. But when paired with Browne’s excerpt, it makes a lot of sense. In her work “Branding Biometrics,” Browne points out that “Elderly users often have very faint fingerprints and may have poorer circulation than younger users,” (Browne 113) meaning that older people are harder to identify through fingerprint scanning biometrics.
This work by Simone Browne also very much touches on my previous point about race and blending in with your surroundings. In this excerpt, Browne points out that, similar to the inconsistences in fingerprint scanning, facial recognition is faulty when trying to determine race and gender identity. People of color are at a disadvantage, again, as the biometrics fail to determine the proper race and gender of these groups at a higher proportion than white people.