Max Bowens

The widespread adoption of metrics into visual technologies of the late nineteenth century marks the beginning of biometrics in America. “Storing the Self: Art, Data, and Repatriation,” chronicles three pivotal periods in the history of biometrics which fundamentally altered the visual construction of political subjecthood. From Civil War era bodysnatching to NAGPRA, passport identification to facial recognition, each phase involved a reconfiguration of the relationship between one’s image and one’s identity— one’s body and one’s data— in tandem with a redefinition of what constitutes an identificatory image. This project tracks the evolution of biometric technology alongside aesthetic and anthropological practices that worked with and against its visual rhetoric. “Storing the Self” pays specific attention to repatriation protocols which are currently dictating the return of early biometric subjects to their rightful Native American and African American ancestral groups.