ABSTRACT
The chapter begins by exploring face recognition, and in particular the promise and danger of automated systems. The use of ID photographs today recalls practices of characterising people by their facial characteristics in the nineteenth century physiognomy that the first use of mug-shots in criminal investigations. The second part of the chapter examines the work of Oliver Sacks and artist Chuck Close, both experience face blindness. The chapter converted into three types of experiments, The first experiment used images from online social networking site Facebook to identify or as they put it re-identify anonymised profiles on a popular dating site. The second experiment the CMU researchers did involved recognising people on the street. The third experiment in the 2011 research showed that it was possible to move from face to demographic information and predict the participants SSN. The successive phases of Chuck Closes work can be read as a sequence of experiments that culminate in this dismantling of the face.
