Machinic Eugenics of the Gaze: Computer Vision, Ageism, and Gender

Abstract

This article analyzes computer vision as a device that shapes contemporary perception and highlights its political and aesthetic implications in social life. The text discusses the social production of data, emphasizing the racist, ageist, and misogynistic biases embedded in artificial intelligence (AI) architectures used to synthesize images, and comments on the biopolitics inherent in these processes. Special attention is given to computational facial recognition techniques, highlighting their connections to Francis Galton's composite portraits, which he termed "statistical paintings," and their dissemination in the contemporary imagination. Throughout the text, it is considered how computer vision—and its pattern-based structure—updates the foundations of eugenic imagination, defining fields of visibility that do not result in genocidal racial wars but algorithmically exclude certain subjects and bodies from the social and political sphere. Based on ongoing artistic research ("Poisonous, Noxious, and Suspicious," about prohibited plants and women erased from the history of art and science), the essay points to the need to deconstruct the potentialities of the emerging machinic eugenics of vision through counter-hegemonic practices and images that escape the pattern.