A Portrait of Facial Recognition: Critical Visualities of Statistics and the Face

Lila Lee-Morrison will discuss a critical inquiry into the visuality of facial recognition technology involving tracing its cultural logics of merging statistics with vision, through an analysis of the proto-method of eigenface. In her analysis she references contemporary artworks of artists such as Zach Blas and Harun Farocki that reimagine and counter the technology’s visual logics and output.

Dr. Lila Lee-Morrison is a writer, scholar, and art historian specializing in the visual cultures of machine vision. Her broader research focuses on the intersection of art and technology, digital culture, the history of scientific photography, art theory and the agency of the image. Since September 2023, Morrison is a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC funded research project Show and Tell: Scientific representation, algorithmically generated visualizations, and evidence across epistemic cultures at Lund University. She is also a member of the research cluster Art & Earth at University of Copenhagen, a 2023 recipient of the Andy Warhol Art Writer’s Grant and a visiting fellow at University of Copenhagen with Intersect, an interdisciplinary community. She has written for Artforum, Media+Environment Journal and been published by published by MIT Press, Liverpool University Press and Brill Publishing.