2020 (preview)
SYNOPSIS
After months of negotiations an independent filmmaker (Daniël Cornelissen) gets permission to interview a prominent consultant working for Iridian Technologies (Nadia Amin). Founded in 1993 by the inventors of the first automated system of iris recognition, Iridian played a seminal role in the advance of biometric identification leading to its current omnipresence. Touching upon key events Iridian was involved in, the filmmaker tries to get a hold of the world view and politics of the corporation. To record the interview he brought two Time-of-Flight sensors, a type of camera often used in biometric systems, generating thirty depth mapped pixel clouds per second. A weightless eye scans their in coarse pixels represented faces, which contort more and more as the conversation slowly turns into an interrogation. A film about the end of faith in strangers.
43 min.
Director's statement
In the first decennia after its invention photography was regarded as an utterly objective medium, a position which nowadays can only strike one as naive: the photographer is an author. This transformation seems to hint at a specific blindness for the subjectivity of emerging technologies of representation. At the heart of this film lies the question: If biometrics for the most part replaced judicial photography, is there a possibility of rethinking the rise of biometrics by inquiring it in the light of the historical subjectification of the photograph?
After a series of interviews with biometric engineers, I found myself struggling with the thoroughly pragmatist discourse of the engineers, which made me wonder: 'What would a politicized defense of the use of biometrics look like?' I started writing a screenplay as a means to explore this question. In it, an independent filmmaker much like myself (Daniël Cornelissen) interviews a consultant working for Iridian Technologies (Nadia Amin). Founded in 1993 by the inventors of iris recognition technology, this corporation played a seminal role in the early development of iris recognition, and biometrics by extension. The two touch upon a series of key events Iridian was involved in: The identification of Sharbat Gula, post 9-11-2001 US Senate hearings on biometrics, and the enrollment of the Indian AADHAAR scheme. Elaborating on these moments a series of broader questions on both the history and future of biometrics arise: How is the concept of the legal identity intertwined with the nation state? How did the gloomy science fiction of Philip K. Dick affected our stance towards contemporary identification technologies? And how did we end up in a situation where one can have a meaningful conversation about this fear the one moment and use your fingerprint to unlock an iPhone seconds later?
The film is shot with two time-of-flight cameras, a type of sensor used in biometric systems. The sensor not only detects color per pixel, but also its distance to the camera, generating thirty 3D pixelclouds per second. This vast amount of captured data allows for a editing process in which nearly every camera angle, movement and perspective can be created in the edit; resulting in a weightless eye, scanning a representation of a failed interview. Although its aesthetics reminds one of digital animation, we are in fact looking at captured data—photography—and stretching the possibilities of its subjectivity to a point where the word 'representation' loses its meaning completely.
