SMILE TO PAY WITH YOUR FACE: HACKING INTO PROGRAMMED FACIALITY IN THE AGE OF BIG DATA AND AI

Abstract

Humanity is facing to be increasingly immersed in the digital world, becoming hackable concerning self-, personhood and our sociality. Companies and even states are engaged in the digital governance of our behaviour and our extended digital doubles and interconnected bodily selves by profiling, tracking, surveillance, automated decision- making and big data that redefine values and our humanity. Big Data and AI do not always empower diversity. Besides aiding and opening up new fields of research that could not previously exist as in complex systems or any endeavour that has to handle vast amounts of data, AI and Big Data confront us in face-recognition und attribution of values such as emotions with inherent biases of data sets and preselected data. With this paper, we heed the perils of Big Data and AI such as our loss of privacy, sociality, autonomy and democracy in data-driven engineered determinism of programmed and automatically reckoned faciality. Programmed Faciality will be hacked into with artistic, aesthetic dramaturgies and media strategies, as a starting point to overcome participation without democracy. Hacking into datafied surveillance might be trailblazing a more just and fairer digital and Big data era leading us beyond a mere algorithmic participative "Use-Age".