Toward a Minor Tech:Pold 500

How to face face recognition?

Søren Bro Pold

Algorithmic profiling on platforms is used to create neighbourhoods of homophily (Chun). Corporate data-driven platforms serve to instrumentalize and capitalize on cognitive resonance (Drucker). This is almost impossible to avoid without simultaneously producing more data to be capitalized. A specific version of the profiling that is integrated into most platforms is the ways that gender recognition is used to censor images on Instagram. To make sure that Instagram is not used for sexual content, pictures with visible female nipples are erased, while male nipples are allowed.

As a continuation of trans activist Courtney Demone’s campaign #DoIHaveBoobsNow from 2015, the Copenhagen-based artist Ada Ada Ada has launched the In Transitu project. Each Thursday since December 2021 she has posted topless selfies of herself during gender transition as “a challenge to the Instagram moderation protocols” (Ada). Furthermore, she sends the images to commercially available gender recognition services. So far, Instagram has not blocked her selfies, though the other services often register her as female, however usually they disagree in their results.

The project demonstrates the discrimination caused by letting commercial services evaluate people into binary genders and controlling access via US moral ethics. As pointed out by Janus Rose: “If we allow these assumptions to be built into systems that control people’s access to things like healthcare, financial assistance or even bathrooms, the resulting technologies will gravely impact trans people’s ability to live in society” (Rose). The project demonstrates, and Ada Ada Ada reflects on, what it takes to be perceived as a specific gender: “The logic seems to be: Short hair = Male. Long hair = Female. Long hair on one side only = 50% Make/50% Female” (Ada).

Ada Ada Ada turns gender recognition into a public performance, which besides the discrimination points to the arbitrariness and absurdity of the gender recognition models and the binary and biased understanding of gender they build on, constructed through image sets. Consequently, they also point to the way gender is constructed in our culture(s). The project is a convincing demonstration that gender is not only biologically but culturally constructed.

In Transitu echoes a practice in the transgender community of posting pictures of bodily changes during gender transition as a way of showing mutual support. However, these images are in fact also captured to automatically ‘out’ transgender people by making gender recognition able to recognize transgender. Since it is still dangerous and even illegal to be transgender in many countries, this is obviously even more problematic than being misgendered.

In Transitu consequently demonstrates how we are all captured, modelled, and recognized by machine vision and profiling. As a performance, it uses this as a stage and to reflect on how we are all being staged. Ada Ada Ada puts herself in the spotlight, which is not without risk, but indeed a courageous act of transgender minor tech: Even if we are controlled by these binary structures, she will not let them define her gender.