Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXIII • Številka/Number 2 • 2002 • 75-92 
T H E B O D Y AS PASSWORD: 
B I O M E T R I C S A N D C O R P O R E A L DISPOSSESSION 1 
NINA CZEGLÉDY AND ANDRÉ P. CZEGLÉDY 
"Information has become a technoscientific concept and conceptualized 
as distinct from the physical markers that embody it." (Katherine Hayles 
quoted in Schoder & Crandell 2001, pp. 16-17) 
Introduction 
Since the 11th of September, 2001 and its series of terrorist attacks in the 
United States, forms of corporeal recognition and identification have gained 
renewed acceptance within state, corporate, and even civilian structures and 
populations. This is the realm of Biometrics, systems of automatic identity 
recognition and authentication based upon unique physiological character-
istics such as facial features, fingerprint designs, hand configurations and voice 
patterns. The current "war on terrorism" has bolstered the production of 
established biométrie technologies, accelerated related research, and advanced 
the widespread use of its devices. It has also considerably legitimated the fur-
ther development of similarly intrusive technologies that extend their reach 
into the once private realms of bodily authority and corporeal identity. 
In addition to current geopolitical security concerns, the substantial ex-
pansion of the biometrics industry has been nourished by several other key 
factors. Firstly, the rapid growth of information and interaction technologies 
over the last decade has stimulated the tendency to shift away from directly 
physical forms of communication to increasingly disembodied states separate 
from physiological presence. Simultaneously, everyday life has increasingly 
become subject to organised scrutiny, both as a feature of new technological 
capabilities and as a matter of changed public policies at every level of opera-
1 Note: Electronic articles and other texts are incorporated into the footnotes rather 
than listed in the bibliography. 
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N I N A CZEGLÉDY AND ANDRÉ P . CZEGLÉDY 
tion. The development of increasingly sophisticated and remotely operated 
sensors - combined with a growing need for data protection - have contrib-
uted greatly to a flourishing surveillance culture whose installation in the 
public psyche has been as sure as it has been surreptitious. Not least, this 
combination of circumstances has encouraged the technological separation 
of corporeal identity from personal bases of knowledge and control in much 
the same way that biomedical technologies have re (produced) bodily selves 
through various forms of digital visualisation (Czegledy & Czegledy 2000a, 
2000b, 2000c, 2001). 
Additionally, affordable computer capabilities and technical enhance-
ment possibilities have allowed for the means to collect and sort, store and 
circulate, retrieve and market, data with a formerly unimaginable precision 
and on a previously undreamed of scale. In the process of establishing giant 
information databases, the private corporeal body has become a key source 
and site for collecting and distributing information. At the same time, its vari-
ous readings have become an issue of publicly traded, commercial property 
that disrupts - if not overturns - the traditional bases of self-knowledge. 
The increased availability and use of biometric devices revives the classic 
man/machine dichotomy that has revolved around all considerations of tech-
nology over time. How does the redefined Digital Persona affect individual 
identity? How can the appropriate utilisation of biometric devices be evalu-
ated? Are the fervently promoted appliances always used for the protection of 
society? Could the resultant "profiles" be misappropriated and potentially 
lead to the criminalisation of harmless individuals? These and similar ques-
tions all have relevance for understanding the rapidly changing interplays 
between technology, bodily identity, and structures of power in society. In the 
intricate loop between man and machine, is encoding (and its resultant pro-
cess of disembodiment) only the first link in a longer chain, a prelude to 
further events, or is it a new stage in societal evolution that will free us from 
the limitations of time, space, and even our own bodies? The primary goal of 
this text is to investigate the displacement of the human body through infor-
mation technology-mediated surveillance techniques, and to present artistic 
interpretations of the man/machine interface. Special attention will be paid 
to the ideas of N. Katherine Hayles and Eugene Thacker, both of whom have 
closely addressed many of the salient issues related to biometrics. In addition, 
we will consider some of the aesthetic commentaries of contemporary artists 
such as Steve Mann, Seiko Mikami and Eduardo Kac, who have each directly 
engaged with, and challenged, the changing relationship between human 
beings and their technology. 
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T H E BODY AS PASSWORD: BIOMETRICS AND CORPOREAL DISPOSSESSION 
The Posthuman Condition 
In our freshly computerised (Western) universe, everything from genet-
ics through physics to astronomy becomes abstract information in the inter-
ests of scientific rationalisation: a code. 
A code without a body, shifted from the physical to the immaterial in the 
depths of cyberspace - a digital representation of the "real substance" of life. 
In the process of encoding (and decoding) the body, previous corporeal as-
sociations have changed, and a loss of individual identity has occurred with 
the development of new cyborgean potentials. In a recent interview with Albert 
Borgmann, Katherine Hayles noted that "both artificial and human intelli-
gences are being reconceptualized in ways that facilitate their interactions 
with one another."2 Her statement underlines the various ways in which over 
the last fifty years the cyborg has emerged as an increasingly real technologi-
cal and cultural construct, a vision of the near future far closer to realistic 
fruition than many would like to think. In a manner of thinking, it is nothing 
less than what might be better understood as the "posthuman condition" 
(Hayles 1999), a dissolution of boundaries that was once only the stuff of 
science fiction dramas. 
While the consideration of cyborgean issues is inevitable when exploring 
the computerised universe, for our current purposes we will focus on the 
coding and decoding process of the digitised body and its further social/ 
cultural ramifications. In order to evaluate this process and its impacts, some 
of the biometric devices (and the industry producing them) need first to be 
reviewed in brief. 
The Biometrics Industry 
Aspects of the "communication revolution" have been heralded as trium-
phal elements in the emancipating conquest of technology over the drudgery 
of physical labour. This near messianic perspective has encouraged its adher-
ents to relish the prospects of instant, trouble-free, sophisticated (and incor-
poreal) forms of interaction that are far removed from the traditional norms 
of physical simultaneity. While this so-called victory remains highly debatable 
from the point of view of access at the very least (and misuse at the worst), the 
benign version of its image has found quick acceptance in an astonishing 
diversity of public fora of late. 
2 http:/ /www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/borghayi.html 
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N I N A CZEGLÉDY AND ANDRÉ P . CZEGLÉDY 
Under the auspices of technically aided improvements to wider societal 
functioning, the successful promotion of such ideas has provided ancillary 
sectors of commerce (such as biometrics equipment development and manu-
facturing) a fertile terrain for both public research, and private venture capi-
tal, funding. In addition, the biometrics industry has adroitly utilised the 
heightened concerns for private and public safety in order to promote its 
products to security conscious international organizations, law enforcement 
agencies, and corporate as well as individual clients. Is everyone a potential 
customer? In our increasingly institutionalised existence, will we have a choice? 
The contemporary attraction of biometrics technologies has a much 
broader market potential than one might sceptically assume given the quickly 
changing, and essentially transient, nature of geopolitical concerns ballooned 
by a variety of electoral imperatives. A pair of continuing issues for any new 
such technological arena remains the expansion of market scope and the 
development of multiple levels of customer accessibility. In this regard, the 
prices of various biométrie devices have substantially decreased in recent years 
due to technological advances in their manufacturing. This condition has 
lead to substantially lower customer entry levels while changing wider no-
tions of affordability. Along with the development of improved operating ef-
ficiency values (as biométrie technologies are continually refined), it prom-
ises new points of affordable product access for a growing pool of prospective 
customers. Even prior to the autumn of 2001, the expected growth rate of the 
biometrics industry was estimated to lie between 30 and 40% per annum 
(Millman 2000). Now, with the added pressure of political imperatives, such 
predictions seem conservative. 
The private sector is, however, only one side of a far wider biometrics 
industry. A level of co-ordination between private interests and public sector 
research, development and application has existed in the United States for at 
least the last decade, ever since the establishment of the Biométrie Consor-
tium in 1992.3 The Consortium's participants include federal security and law 
enforcement agencies, national research laboratories, federally-funded tech-
nology corporations, university research institutes, the military services and a 
wide variety of other parties. Its main function is to encourage the research, 
development, testing and evaluation of identification/verification technolo-
gies. 
The events of September 2001 have fur ther encouraged increased in-
volvement by the government in the biometrics industry, partly in the sup-
posed interests of national security, and partly in the more conventional in-
3 The US Federal Government in 1995 formally approved the Biometric Consortium. 
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T H E BODY AS PASSWORD: BIOMETRICS AND CORPOREAL DISPOSSESSION 
terests of scientific regulation and commercial control. It is, therefore, not 
surprising that the Chairman of the House Science Committee recently an-
nounced his expectation to receive "greater attention" for government re-
search initiatives connected with identification technologies (Leopold 2001). 
Such attention is increasingly likely to pool in a limited number of science/ 
technology sectors, with the field of biometrics being substantially represented 
through the previously established Biometrics Research Programme (BRP) 
and its mission "devoted to understanding physiological correlates of cogni-
tion in individuals with and without psychopathology."4 
The BRP involves a wide spectrum of activities ranging from the testing 
of standardised databases to facilitating conferences and publications, and 
providing access to information on the Internet. Irrespective of the outcomes 
of the BRP, it is already clear that specific biometrics technologies - each with 
its own proprietary device (s) - are leading the way in establishing new forms 
of identity recognition. Key applications already developed by American and 
international agencies, institutes and companies often focus on either au-
thentication or access to computer systems containing sensitive information 
or physical access control to secure spaces. Nevertheless, spin-off scenarios 
just as readily call for military applications: some of the most sophisticated 
surveillance and reconnaissance innovations currently used include unmanned 
aerial vehicles (UAV) in Afghanistan, for example. UAVs such as General 
Atomic Corporation's Predator and Grumman Aerospace's Global Hawk, have 
been used in a variety of ways to support C4ISR missions gathering enemy 
information, designating targets for air strikes and collecting information for 
battle damage assessment (Keeter 2001). It is, however, in the more main-
stream application of civilian life that biometric devices will soon demon-
strate their greatest impact. 
Biometric Devices 
Currently used biometric devices measure and calibrate specific physi-
ological attributes of the human body. They tend to focus on specific parts of 
the body and, in a form of double reinforcement, specific features of its cor-
poreal structure. As a direct consequence, we now encounter an increasing 
variety of biometric technologies that produce a corresponding plurality of 
bodily images or profiles depending upon their accuracy a n d / o r the nature 
of their visualisation procedures. In a very real sense, these images/profiles 
4 ht tp: / /www.wpic.pit t .edu/research/biometrics/default .html 
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NINA CZEGLÉDY AND ANDRÉ P . CZEGLÉDY 
are composed of bodily readings that are always partial, f ragmented and de-
tached f rom the physical entireties to which they belong - and which they are 
increasingly taken to represent the individual in a universalistic sense of iden-
tity. 
Fingerprinting is perhaps the most widely known, and likely the most 
extensively used, identification device. It is also one of the earliest technolo-
gies for identity recording and recognition; ever since its pioneering use in 
the American West of the late 19th century by Pinkerton's National Detective 
Agency, the technology has also been indelibly connected to criminal investi-
gation in the popular imagination. Originally conducted only on a manual 
basis, contemporary fingerprinting procedures are today facilitated by the 
use of fingerprint scanner systems that are, in their turn, aided by computer 
processing programmes and linked to data archives. Fingerprint scanners read 
and automatically evaluate distinct characteristics such as the skin contours 
(ridges and valleys) of the human hand, and the scanned fingerprint image is 
then converted to mathematical vectors called minutiae. Certain sensor de-
vices are capable of reading any finger on either hand, at varying positions 
and pressures. In this sense, the long history of fingerprinting as both tech-
nology and technique lends itself to a surety that other, sometimes more so-
phisticated, biométrie technologies do not yet possess. In addition, finger-
printing remains comfortably familiar as a technology; it is also cost-effective 
and arguably the least intrusive method of bodily identification. 'You are your 
fingerprint (U.are.U fingerprint scanner)," runs an advertisement for Digital 
Persona, a company which has specialised over the last 25 years in the pro-
duction of biométrie devices with a focus on fingerprint recognition. Accord-
ing to Favio Righi, owner of Digital Persona, "Objectively speaking, finger-
print patterns are as likely to be repeated as snowflakes" (Keener 2000). 
Remote controlled and operated cameras, employed in central public 
spaces are the next most widely used of biométrie devices. Municipal councils 
ranging from Cambridge, England to Johannesburg, South Africa have re-
cently turned to the installation of city centre surveillance systems as a way of 
responding to public concerns regarding both personal and property crime. 
The argument generally given in favour of these surveillance systems is that 
not only that are they a cost-effective way of policing the inner city (day and 
night) by remote means, but they also increase police response times and 
provide a record of activity which may then be used as evidence in a court of 
law. Such reasoning has its obvious extensions on both technological and 
public policy grounds; the recent combination of the two has encouraged the 
idea of "preventive" surveillance. Such surveillance incorporates technolo-
gies that seek to anticipate criminal a n d / o r anti-social activity by targeting 
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T H E BODY AS PASSWORD: BIOMETRICS AND CORPOREAL DISPOSSESSION 
specific categories of socially suspect individual: lately, remote-controlled cam-
eras have become available for installation with face recognition software at-
tached to their visual processing systems. Clearly, the multiple linking of such 
visual and data systems is but a step away from more intensive networking 
scenarios that would extend the use of databases into every (literal) walk of 
life. 1984 has arrived late, but well equipped. 
A more recent technology that focuses attention on the combination of 
human physiology with individual attributes of physiological activity is that of 
voice recognition. Currently, acoustic microphones with voice authentication 
software are more easily obtainable than ever before. An ever-increasing range 
of biométrie devices can be used on Microsoft Windows and other commer-
cially available software; since the summer of 2000, some manufacturers have 
been shipping their laptop computers to retailers - already equipped with 
biométrie devices. Such devices exist to meet any degree of security and suspi-
cion (such as computer passwording) but can also be utilised in a further 
range of applications when connected to employee, or even customer, sur-
veillance systems. The current sophistication of voice recognition technology 
is such that, when coupled with quite basic recording programmes, it is now 
possible to monitor verbal communication on a virtually continuous basis 
(depending upon equipment sensitivity a n d / o r device density proximate to 
the targeted subjects)- with the added dimension of selectivity. The latter 
dimension is incorporated by way of recording conversations that feature spe-
cific words a n d / o r phrases as trigger points. In conjunction with voice recog-
nition abilities, this technology can now pick out specific people as well as 
specific conversations, thereby reigning in the reach of surveillance possibili-
ties to within economic limits of analysis. 
Biometrics technologies have also been applied to a range of contexts 
where security concerns may dominate the built environment: military instal-
lations, sensitive documentation centres and government buildings, for ex-
ample. Of more interest is, perhaps, their increasing application within the 
private sector, where commercial laboratories for proprietary products as well 
as high-level corporate offices are being fitted with security systems that in-
corporate biometrics technologies. On the one hand, such changes to the 
working architecture of the commercial environment speak of the extension 
of previously rarefied technologies into the public realm. On the other, they 
highlight the ways in which so much of the content of contemporary commu-
nication is becoming simultaneously privileged and guarded in the modern 
world of information as commodity. 
When it comes to security concerns, three biometrics technologies have 
received particular attention lately: retinal scanning, iris scanning, and hand 
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N I N A CZEGLÉDY AND ANDRÉ P . CZEGLÉDY 
geometry analysis. Retinal scan devices read the pattern of the blood vessels 
inside the eye; they are also now available to those individuals and institutions 
willing to pay top dollar for such sophisticated technology. Iris scanners read 
the unique pattern formed by tissues at the f ront of the eye. Because these 
patterns are far more differentiated than fingerprints, they are also more ac-
curate in terms of recognition precision. Iris scanners are thereby tougher to 
defeat than their fingerprint counterparts and may yet supersede them as a 
form of common identity verification. Yet, while highly accurate, iris scan-
ning can also be physically uncomfortable for the average person - who must 
get physically close to the scanner in order for a proper reading to be accom-
plished. In contrast, a less intrusive technology remains hand geometry, which 
measures the height of the fingers, the distance between the joints and the 
shape of the knuckles - but is considered somewhat less accurate than other 
approaches, and therefore less frequently employed. 
Once a part of the paranoid fiction of Hollywood movies featuring one 
secretive government agency after another, each of these technologies is now 
an accepted part of many ultra-secure access facilities in the present day - a 
part of the ordinary working lives of thousands of scientists, civil servants and 
military personnel. This circumstance would have little bearing on its own, 
except that it is a reality which is but part of the widening presence of biomet-
rics in all walks of life. Do we now await a fur ther synthesis of biometrics tech-
nology with the human body? Are we ready for a postbiological body? 
Biometric Extension of the Body 
"A liar's blush may expose terrorists..." noted Roger Highfield in the 
Irish Independent of 7 January, 2002. His statement underlined the way in which 
high definition thermal imaging technologies (recently developed at the Mayo 
Clinic in Rochester, Michigan) might be applied to a variety of security con-
texts. Such application could soon mean that "... terrorists who attempt to 
conceal their real identity while trying to board a plane or enter a govern-
ment building could be identified by the way they blush." While this scenario 
may exist as one of the most current examples of identification and encoding 
technologies leading to a concrete material result (i.e. apprehension and in-
carceration of a suspected criminal), the debate over bodily encoding and its 
eventual consequences is of far longer standing. 
In the twentieth century, the efficiency considerations of machine /hu-
man combinations became popular in military circles when technological 
advances extended human capabilities on the battlefield and, in some cases, 
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T H E BODY AS PASSWORD: BIOMETRICS AND CORPOREAL DISPOSSESSION 
even replaced them (as in the case of aerial reconnaissance drones, cruise 
missiles, etc.). Discussing the disguised uses of Cybernetics Theory as applied 
to virtual and artificial life for military applications, Katherine Hayles once 
noted: 
"Here the idea of emergence is foremost - the thought that complex 
systems, when recursively restructured, can spontaneously evolve in directions 
their creators did not anticipate" (Hayles 2001, pp. 16-17). 
In line with the above statement, she considers the aspiration to "concep-
tualize human being and human cognition in terms that allow to be articu-
lated seamlessly with intelligent machines" (Hayles 2001, p. 18) as an impor-
tant impulse of contemporary life. She further argues that various ideas -
such as Hans Moravec's prediction of the impending downloading of human 
consciousness into a computer - contribute to the erosion of the significance 
of embodiment and its primacy of corporeality. This is a line of thinking that 
fundamentally engages Western culture's attitude towards how the body is 
simultaneously understood: both as subject and object. Not least, it is a no-
tion critically encountered in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962,1968a, 
1968b), who vehemently argued against unlimited abstraction by consider-
ing the ways in which the human body is both sentient and sensuous, a dou-
bling that cannot be reduced to mechanistic representations of the self. 
Nevertheless, the march of technological endeavour seems to remain 
uninterrupted: in August of 1998, Prof. Kevin Warick, made news by having 
himself injected with an encapsulated microchip. The capsule held an elec-
tromagnetic coil and a silicon chip, the implant allowing him to turn on lights 
and open doors that were linked to computers which could electronically 
sense his presence. Warick, Head of the Cybernetics Department at the Uni-
versity of Reading, was experimenting with the technical possibilities of com-
municating and interacting with computers. While he was prepared for the 
relatively innocuous physical changes as a result of the medical procedure, 
the mental affects - which he described as "feeling strange" - seemed to find 
him considerably less prepared on a psychological level. "I feel mentally dif-
ferent. When I am in the building I feel much more closely connected with 
the computer. I am not a separate thing. I am a scientist, so that is strange for 
me, but that's how I feel. It changed what I feel like mentally which I hadn' t 
expected and which is very strange and a bit scary,"5 is how he described his 
altered state. 
Does Warick's experiment herald a new stage arrived in the man/ma-
chine interface, a postbiological body that crystallises cyborgean reality? 
5 ht tp:/ /abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/cyborgman.html) 
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N I N A CZEGLÉDY AND ANDRÉ P . CZEGLÉDY 
Postbiological Bodies and bioMEMs ? 
The post-biological condi t ion of the h u m a n body has long been 
popularised in science fiction literature. Prominent descriptions in this genre 
range from the fully sentient cyborgs of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of 
Electric Sheep (1968) - later to be filmed by Ridley Scott as Blade Runner (1982) 
- to the "intelligent biochips" found in Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985) and a 
human consciousness transferred onto computer memory in William Gibson's 
more recent "The Winter Market" (1995). These creations may seem at first 
glance to be firmly embedded in the realm of literary creativity, but like many 
past such imaginings, are just as likely to be harbingers of the future in a 
Vernean vein. 
In the second half of the last century, the general issue of blurred bound-
aries between man and machine received increasing interest f rom scholars 
and artists alike. In the new millennium, such interest has hardly abated -
along with issues of changing identity that remain deeply embedded in the 
surrounding public discourse. One important commentator of late has been 
Eugene Thacker. While Thacker's academic background is in critical and 
literary theory, for several years now his interests have centred on the inter-
section of art and science, the latter with respect to biotechnologies, in par-
ticular. In an interview (on 30 March, 2001) with Josephine Bosma, Thacker 
revealed that texts investigating how the body is reconfigured by various tech-
nologies, such as the theories of George Bataille and science fiction writers 
like J. G. Ballard and Michael Blumlein, inspired his own art work and pub-
lished texts. One of his recent art projects focusing on the Visible Human 
Project6 by the National Library of Medicine directly refers to the notion of 
digital anatomy, and was exhibited at Ars Electrónica in 1999. Thacker said 
that while looking at the Visible Human Project on the Internet, he was struck 
by the objectification and information transfer of this physically sliced and 
digitally encoded corpse, and drew inspiration from it for his piece on what 
he terms "databasing the body."7 
In his lecture at the recent "Fashioning the Future" conference (Society 
for the Social Studies of Science, 1-4 November, 2001) held in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, Eugene Thacker presented his views regarding "Wet Data: 
Biomedia & BioMEMS."8 He noted that as far back as 1959, the Nobel Prize 
physicist Richard Feynman (while outlining his vision of future technologies) 
predicted the development of miniature devices with control abilities at m o 
6 http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html 
7 http://www.nettime.org Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0103/msg00175.html 
8 http://www.nettime.org 07 Nov 2001 
8 4 
T H E BODY AS PASSWORD: BIOMETRICS AND CORPOREAL DISPOSSESSION 
lecular and atomic levels. Feynman also pointed out that while the networked 
power of cellular structures has already been recognised by molecular biolo-
gists, the same phenomenon also provides an excellent model for use in in-
formation technologies.9 In ensuing decades, his vision greatly influenced 
scholarly research spanning a wide range of bioscientific disciplines such as 
nanotechnology and molecular biotechnology. Today, bio-micro-electro-me-
chanical systems (bioMEMs) are widely used in specific areas of diagnostic 
medicine. 
Between the 1960s and the turn of the century, the pragmatic results of 
Feynman's predictions become evident well beyond the field of biotechnol-
ogy, both in communication and information research and development. 
Inevitably, this progress has also created new dichotomies: on the one hand, 
the rapid development of biotechnologies led to improved clinical diagnosis, 
simultaneously, the related technological advances foregrounded philosophi-
cal considerations regarding the relationship between the biological body 
and machine/technology, including the future use of micro devices. Yet 
whether the microchips are used for medical diagnostics or identification, 
the ethical questions of redefining the shifting man/machine paradigm have 
remained cogent due to a similar set of circumstances. Indeed, "Are bioMEMs 
simply tools, or are they in some way viable, living systems," as Thacker has 
questioned. We might add the question that in view of these developments, 
how do we define the boundaries between the source (biological body) and 
the encoded, in-organic data, especially as these technologies are capable of 
drawing together biological and non-biological materials in an often seam-
less flow, thereby creating a hybrid cybernetic system in the process? 
Transcoding the Body 
As Eugene Thacker has noted, certain tools "such as microarrays have as 
their main function the transmission of data types across media, and such 
devices act as a kind of fulcrum transmitting data from one platform to an-
other."10 The media theorist Lev Manovich (2000) has labelled the transmis-
sion of encapsulated information across hybrid media "transcoding." The 
process of transcoding, Manovich suggests, goes far beyond routine technical 
procedures, and involves the transference of concepts and categories of 
thought from one medium to another. Thus, the computer logic of bioMEMs 
9 see Feynman, Richard "There is plenty of room at the bottom" http://www.zyvex.com/ 
nanotech/ feynman.html 
10 ht tp: / /www.nett ime.org 07 Nov 2001 
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N I N A CZEGLÉDY AND ANDRÉ P . CZEGLÉDY 
and /o r identification data, stored and distributed has far reaching, transform-
ing consequences influencing our cultural views and everyday life behaviours. 
Perhaps the best known example of transcoding is, of course, genomic 
profiling, including the extensive data collection known as the Human Ge-
nome Project. International contributors to this initiative - as much as it has 
been publicised - have mapped and assembled structural human genetic in-
formation since 1990. The major goals of the project were to (1) identify all 
of the approximately 30,000 genes in human DNA, (2) determine the se-
quences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up this DNA, (3) store 
this information in databases, (4) improve technological tools for data analy-
sis, (5) transfer related technologies to the private sector, and (6) address the 
ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that may arise from the project itself.11 
A working draft of the entire human genome sequence was announced in 
June 2000, with analyses published in February 2001. Notably, the announce-
ment indicated that the mapping of the human genome had been completed 
ahead of the specified target dates with the assistance of interested corpora-
tions such as Celera and DoubleTwist. 
While corporate involvement provided invaluable assistance to the Project, 
it goes without saying that this involvement was also aimed at the successful 
pharmaceutical development of genetic medicine and bioinformatics (the 
computerisation of biotechnology). Bioinformatics forms a bridge between 
the source (human body) and encoded inorganic information. The available 
computer resources of the sponsoring corporations contributed to a smooth 
informatics process of encoding and decoding. "So, what we are facing, philo-
sophically, technically, and politically, with an event such as DoubleTwist's 
annotated genome, is not the incorporation of the body into technology, and 
it is not a process of disembodiment - despite the far-reaching tendency to-
wards informatics. Instead, we are seeing steps in a long, complex process of 
the creation of the conditions for an informatics-based approach to the body, 
where data not only encodes the molecular body, but it also precedes and 
constitutes the body."12 This process is, too often, an unreflective one (in so 
much as it is primarily profit-driven in the commercial context). While such 
reflection has surfaced in the media as a result of increasing public concerns 
regarding the exponential nature of technological advances, it is in the artis-
tic community where one may often find unhindered commentary on issues 
related to biometrics, bioinformatics and other bodily technologies. 
11 ht tp:/ /www.ornl.gov/hgmis/ 
12 See Thacker's article The Post-Genomic Era Has Already Happened (Originally posted 
at The Thing Reviews ht tp: / /bbs . th ing.net 
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T H E BODY AS PASSWORD: BIOMETRICS AND CORPOREAL DISPOSSESSION 
Body, Technology and Art 
Cyborgean, posthuman, postbiological theories have been debated in a 
wide variety of often controversial publications such as those of Dana Haraway 
(1985) and N. Katherine Hayles (1999). In this respect, Eugene Thacker of-
ten refers to "wet data" and "moist technology," concepts that have been ex-
tensively explored and presented by Roy Ascott. "Between the dry world of 
virtuality and the wet world of biology lies a moist domain, a new interspace 
of potentiality and promise" writes Ascott (2000, p. 2) in an introductory es-
say entitled "Edge-Life: technoethic structures and moist media." He proposes 
that so-called "moist media," including atoms, neurons and genes, will be a 
significant, transformative agent in the art of this coming century. His predic-
tion rests not on rash assumptions but on the recognition of an established 
trajectory of artistic endeavour over the last half decade. 
Body centred art - especially expressed through early video works by Valie 
Export, Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovic - became increasingly 
visible in the 1960s. Valie Export's innovative body performances in the late 
sixties involved the strapping of various visual devices to her body. Her Touch 
Cinema (1968) and Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) performances were fore-
runners of future wearable, digital works such as those of Steve Mann.13 Mann 
is the inventor of the "WearCam," a wearable computer with visual display 
capabilities. Although beginning as a simply recording device, later versions 
of this personal imaging system were incorporated into eyeglasses that in-
verted conventional surveillance situations, thereby giving Mann the ability 
to reverse the gaze of technology in a manner which highlighted the uncom-
fortable power of institutional forces in contemporary society (see Mann 1998). 
Not surprisingly, his (undetected) use of the Wearcam, which involved re-
cording the surveillance devices and operators (i.e. in department stores) 
whose original role was encode his image into their surveillance system re-
ceived quick attention in both the artistic and mainstream communities. 
Building on the work of the 1960s pioneers, an escalating number of 
artists over the past decade have experimented with intimate investigations of 
their own bodies. These artistic (and often performance oriented) "experi-
ments" have frequently included relatively radical surgical interventions a n d / 
or the bodily incorporation of robotic, prosthetic extensions. The works of 
Stelarc, Orlan and Mona Hatoum are among the best recognised in this arena 
of artistic enquiry. Stelarc's work is focused on the "obsolescence" of the body, 
and in his performances he has experimented with various robotic prosthe-
13 h t tp : / /wearcam.org / index .h tml 
87 
NINA CZEGLÉDY AND ANDRÉ P . CZEGLÉDY 
ses to "update" his biological body. Since 1990, Orlan has undergone a series 
of plastic surgical operations in order to transform herself into a new visage, 
a new being. In one of her best known works: Corps étranger (1994), Hatoum 
inserted a camera into her body cavities, thereby providing unusual, uncom-
fortable yet intimate interior body-views for her audiences. 
Seiko Mikami uses less provocative, but equally intriguing means to present 
interactive installations such as Molecular Informatics - morphogenic substance 
via eye tracking, which incorporates "eye tracking input" technology. Struc-
tures of molecules are generated in real-time according to the movements of 
the viewer's eyes during their "interaction" with the installation technology. 
The viewer wears a pair of virtual reality (VR) glasses equipped with an eye-
tracking sensor and observes - and creates — the VR space. The physical move-
ments of the viewer is transcoded into data recording the individual's loca-
tion within the 3-Dimensional space and, as a result, the viewer find h i m / 
herself in a world of molecules and molecular formations. Over the years, 
Mikami has built several versions of this project, the latest (Version 4) of which 
includes a sound recognition program in order to add an acoustic dimension 
to the performance of interaction. In his own words: 'You can hear another 
person's eye movements in space via sound."14 
In another installation project titled "World Membrane and the Dismem-
bered Body," Mikami changes physiological tack and utilises the audience's 
heart and lung sounds in order to generate the substance of interaction. The 
participating viewer's internal body sounds are amplified and digitised by a 
computer. The digital signals then act as mathematical parameters to form 
what he calls "a continuously transforming 3-D polygon mesh expressing 
sounds and images in the room." These sounds and images are then compli-
cated and enhanced as the exhibition visitor's ear - serving as a continuing 
interface to the audible noises that h i s /he r own body emits - creates feed-
back for the system. Such feedback not only emphasises the technological 
circuit embedded in the performative installation, it also highlights the ways 
in which the use of various technologies is already an integral part of our 
daily lives in an unobtrusive, but influential manner . 
The Art of Biométrie Intrusion 
"More than anticipate profound changes in perception, in our concep-
tion of the world, and in the reorganization of our socio-political systems, 
14 h t tp : / /b ionet_org. tripod.com/eye3.html 
88 
T H E BODY AS PASSWORD: BIOMETRICS AND CORPOREAL DISPOSSESSION 
these pioneers foresee fundamental transformations in our species," noted 
Arlindo Machado15 in his analysis of Eduardo Kac's Time Capsule (1997) project, 
the very project which best illustrates the general theme of this discussion. 
Time Capsule is part performance, part lived reality; it represents a willing 
cyborg connection within the body of the artist, one that speaks of genealogi-
cal (and thus human) time as much as its technological products. The project, 
which focused on the implantation of an identification microchip into the 
ankle of Kac, took place at the Sao Paulo cultural centre Casa das Rosas on 
the 17th of November, 1997. The nine-digit microchip was registered via 
Internet with a database in the United States. Beyond the surgical procedure 
(carried out under sterile conditions with clinical assistance), the audience 
also witnessed several sepia photographs lining the walls of the centre. Sym-
bolically linking memory and identity, and emphasising both the temporal 
and ephemeral features of this artwork, these photographs were family por-
traits of the artist's family members in Poland who had been exterminated 
during the Second World War. Nearly immediately following the surgical in-
tervention, scanned images of the artist's body, including a x-ray showing the 
microchip insertion procedure became publicly observable on the Internet. 
The event was extremely well publicised on national television and in the 
printed press, thereby reaching both a general public in Brazil and a global 
audience via the Internet. Kac would later comment on the project by noting: 
"The emergence of biometrics, with its conversion of irrepeatable per-
sonal traits — such as iris patterns and fingerprint contours - into digital data, 
is a clear sign that the closer technology gets to the body the more it tends to 
permeate it. Experimental medical research towards the creation of artificial 
retinas using microchips imbedded in the eye in order to enable the blind to 
see, for example, forces us to accept the liberating effects of intrabody micro-
chips. At the same time, the legal seizing and patenting of DNA samples from 
indigenous cultures by biotech companies, and their subsequent sale through 
the Internet, shows that not even the most personal of all biological traits is 
immune to greed and to technology's omnipresence.'"6 
Kac's commentary foregrounds the difficult and uneasy, socio-political 
and ethical issues that are present with the commercial availability of biomet-
ric devices. His Time Capsule is shown to act as not only a personal initiative of 
artistic creativity but also a direct challenge to the socially constructed nature 
of ideas of bodily intrusion. In this general regard, Machado has observed 
that: 
15 Machado, Arlindo 1998 "A microchip inside the body" nettime 22 February 
16 http:www.ekac.org/timec.html 
89 
N I N A CZEGLÉDY AND ANDRÉ P . CZEGLÉDY 
"As the placement of a foreign body (Duchamp's urinal) in the sacred 
space of the museum had unpredictable consequences for subsequent art, 
the implantation of a microchip inside the body of an artist will intensify the 
debate on the paths that both art and the human species will travel in the 
next millennium" (Machado 1998). 
Disappearance and Dispossession 
According to Machado, one can easily interpret Kac's bodily interven-
tion as a warning signal of the impending use of technologies in a surveil-
lance society of the foreseeable future. A microchip, such as the one now 
implanted in Kac, could be similarly implanted in anyone at birth, and then 
used as a significant tool for the purposes of lifelong identification and moni-
toring. Yet another interpretation suggested by Machado identifies a possible 
biological mutation utilising implanted digital memories in order to supple-
ment or replace one's own memories. This eventuality might have easily been 
the artist's intention all along; by displaying the photographs of deceased 
family members along with the numerically encoded data of his own body, 
Time Capsule presents us with a series of personal, social and technological 
juxtapositions. These juxtapositions may be taken to act as a reminder of the 
scope of historical changes pertaining to wider power relations within society 
- and distinct views on the place of the individual as body (and body as legiti-
mate individual) vis-à-vis the state. The main question here is obviously one of 
control, a control that surfaces, and resurfaces, each time the individual must 
confront the sort of institutional forces that create, control, or seek to con-
trol, both the technologies we see, and those we too frequently overlook. 
Lately, the identity theft of biométrie data has become a serious concern 
for those individuals (as well as institutions) that are aware of the intrinsic 
fragility of electronic information. Large databases of information are always 
liable to a variety of both cataloguing and processing errors. These errors 
may be minor at times, but their impacts in an increasingly networked world 
may have very real (that is, drastic) consequences for an individual - all indi-
viduals - who by bureaucratic necessity exist as a series of legal, commercial, 
and social categories in one and many files. This circumstance is but a rela-
tively benign predicament, however, for in addition, there is the very real risk 
that the information in a given database may be used for unanticipated, unin-
tended, and possibly illegal, purposes. Such misuse immediately brings to 
mind the possibilities of electronic terrorism side by side with the violent ver-
sions with which we began our discussion. After all, just as the production of 
90 
T H E BODY AS PASSWORD: BIOMETRICS AND CORPOREAL DISPOSSESSION 
encoded information becomes readily available through biometric technolo-
gies, so too do the opportunities for the counterfeiting of biometric informa-
tion, whether it is in terms of pictures, fingerprints or retinal scans. As David 
Lyon has noted recently: "The rise of surveillance societies has everything to 
do with disappearing bodies" (2001, p.15). 
This sense of disappearance lies at the very heart of biometric technolo-
gies in as much as they not only enhance institutional controls on the body in 
ways which Foucault (1977) never anticipated, but in how they contribute to 
what may be understood as a dispossession of the body. Such dispossession is 
achieved by virtue of the body's transformation into something neither fully 
corporeal nor completely mechanical. This dispossession of the body is con-
ducted through the capture of the body's image, in the first instance. Retinal 
scanning, iris scanning, hand geometry analysis and their sister technologies 
do not merely represent the body; in the sense of their fundamental mallea-
bility as encoded information they transform its very physical veracity. In the 
second instance, dispossession is achieved by way of a heuristic slight-of-hand 
wherein the primacy of technological means overshadows any other forms of 
knowledge regarding our bodies, regarding us. Where once our identity was 
our bodies, it can now take the form of a computer file. Will the resultant 
dispossession leave us with an imagined authenticity far removed from the 
corporeal nature of our birth? Will this be by choice? 
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