MFA Fine Art and MFA Curating Lecture: Zach Blas

This talk will focus on Blas’ recent artwork and writing, which both contribute toward a theory of ‘informatic opacity’, meaning practices that resist emerging modes of digital capture, such as biometric recognition technologies, and insist on an embodied dimension of the life that cannot be fully abstracted by technical processes of calculation and visualization. Blas will explore this idea through an engagement with Éduoard Glissant’s writings on opacity and his critique of transparency, as well as Blas’ own art projects Facial Weaponization Suite, which consists of creating ‘collective masks’ for public intervention, and Face Cages, a dystopian installation that considers the abstract violence of biometric control.