For the past two months I have been living in my body archive researching desire. I’ve reached so deep inside myself and exposed to light the most vulnerable pieces of me that I lost track of where they belong. I am tired of trying to put words to feeling. I have to figure out how to reshelve emotion in my body archive. I was told recently we can’t always have what we want.

I sucked on the meat of a rambutan and peeled it away from the seed with my lips and tongue. I chewed, and swallowed. Will all the pain I’ve endured live inside me forever? I can’t accept that. I thought about keeping the seed but decided it was a reminder of my impossible helplessness and threw it away along with all the spiny skin. Can I choose what enters my archive?

Julietta Singh wrote about her desire for the archive by describing the emergence of desire. She says:

There are at least two ways to understand the emergence of a desire: one is through a moment, when something shifts and the way you act and react, the way you turn things over, is fundamentally altered. The other is through accrual, how over time and repetition our histories draw us toward certain practices and ways of feeling and wanting. (8)

I don’t want my body to be an archive. I want to deaccession that which no longer serves me. I am not ready to be who I am now forever. I have been immersed in desire, have acted and reacted, and have contorted myself. I have been digging through myself. I have tried to make myself perceptible. I have archived my chase of pleasure. I have been living beyond myself; accruing without assessing, collecting against my needs. My history has informed me that I am most valuable when I conceal parts of myself. I fear vulnerability, I fear imposition. I won’t accept your help, I can’t prove you mean it. You’ll resent me, won’t you.

And yet the body archive is revered as a source of power, a reservoir of ancestral memory and knowledge, a way of understanding ourselves through our physical relation to the world. A dance, a song, a bruise, being in the city, being in the woods; we are fed. What comes into our body archive is not prematurely analyzed and accepted, it just is. I am terrified. Will I never get over what has been done to my body? Can I not reject it? Will those violations live on in me next to the first time I held my baby sister, the smell of the person I love’s skin? I don’t want them to share space. I am tired of talking about my feelings again.

Indigenous author and academic Deborah A. Miranda writes about her body as archive. She writes:

When my body is the archive,

the archives become flesh and blood

with a salty genealogy, a hunger

for truth, rattling beloved bones

that hold everything sacred—

and you understand at last:

the archive was never inanimate,

never dead;

the archive was never

yours.

My body is no archive. The archive does not feel sacred. It feels static, hierarchical, insistent and orderly. I don’t want to carry everything with me, I want to choose what is sacred. Can my body be an altar?

My mom builds altars. They are usually religiously chaotic: Jesus appears next to Kali and the Buddha. My mom and I don’t agree on the existence of a higher power. Children often ask better questions and I always did. But the altar was a place for honoring and remembering. When something was special it became a part of the display, which was often perfumed in sage or incense. Things could always be taken away, value shifted. The altar does not grow indefinitely, it has boundaries and changes face.

Julietta Singh writes:

The body archive is an attunement, a hopeful gathering, an act of love against the foreclosures of reason. It is a way of knowing the body-self as a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter, of turning toward rather than against oneself. And vitally, it is a way of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies. (29)

I want to feel love that forgoes the “foreclosures of reason.” I want to agree. But I don’t see the archive as something that is easily undone. It is colonial. It is reason. It is fear of forgetting, of being wrong, of letting die. Am I being too harsh? Not on you, on myself.

Kathy Vargas’s photographs are altars and also bodies. In Priests (Dancing Bird), 1987-89, Vargas creates phantom movement through double exposure. The body of a dead bird seems to prance over a nest of sticks and thorns. Its body is caught in the midst of revival from one plane, stuck now in another: the photograph. It lives again in representation and mirrors Christ’s resurrection. The image is a dedication to the spirit of the creature, and of god, or creation itself. There is attention, and purpose. It is made sacred through devotion. I want my body to be an altar. I want there to be dancing. About dance as performance art, Andre Lepecki writes: “a body may have always already been nothing other than an archive” (35).

Kathy Vargas, Priests (Dancing Bird), (1987-1989)

On my body-altar is a photograph of my beloved sister. There is a glass of tap water I refill every day. There are my grandmother’s pearls. There is the mole on my abdomen. There is the hole in my nose from the piercing I regret getting at 16. There is the scar on my cheek where I was bitten by a dog and made beautiful. There is a clay stone made of polluted earth. There is the last birthday card I received that said “I love you.” I am made of accumulated desire.

I tentatively remove the stone and place it gently at my side. I replace it with the rambutan seed. The salty burn of seawater in Manzanita makes my eyes sing. My grandmother’s pearls can stay. I place a memory in the incense holder and let it burn into the air and my lungs. Lady who would rather not remind herself. Is it inevitable that my body is an archive? Can I pull again that which has been removed from my altar space? Is insisting that my body is no archive just a rejection born of the fear that I will always feel? That I will have to confront myself forever? Yes.

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Bibliography:

Lepecki, Andre. “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances.” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 28–48. 35.

Miranda, Deborah A. “When My Body is the Archive.” Poem. The American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42:2. 125-126.

Singh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Book. Punctum Books, 2018. 19.

Vargas, Kathy. Priests (Dancing Bird). Photograph. 1987-1989. Gelatin silver print with hand-coloring, 20 x 24 in., in the exhibition Kathy Vargas: Photographs, at the Marion Koogler Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. Retrieved from Kathy Vargas: Photographs museum catalog.

I saw Zach Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite (2011-2014) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art towards the end of 2024. The work was featured in the exhibition Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film (up until July 2025). I was struck by the work’s conceptual complexity despite its visual simplicity. The suite is comprised of four colored, plastic masks, representing a variety of global social issues related to visibility. The blue mask was created in response to a workshop Blas held about “visibility, recognition, and concealment,” where the Muslim veil and the exposure of an Egyptian female protestor’s blue bra during her beating by state police stirred conversation about a Western investment in visibility politics.1 The black mask (figure 1) “explores the tripartite conception of blackness: the inability of biometric technologies to detect dark skin as racist, the favoring of black in military aesthetics, and black as that which informatically obfuscates.”2 The only work with a name other than Mask and the date of creation, is Fag Face Mask (figure 2), which was created using biometric data gathered from queer men’s faces, scrambled and regenerated.3

My sister turns to me and grimaces. She watches Facial Weaponization Communique: Fag Face (2012), a video artwork on biometric surveillance. Behind her, Facial Weaponization Suite (2011-2014) is displayed as part of Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film (Nov. 2024 - July 2025) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photographed by the author, 2024

The masks of Facial Weaponization Suite cast slight and globby shadows; they don’t look like a traditional mask that exchanges one face for another; they erase the face entirely. When worn, the masks lay atop the face like mysterious liquids in anti-gravity stasis, or casts of living, alien material. They create “a strange, unrecognizable excess” of matter.4 But despite appearing completely inhuman, each mask is an assemblage of human faces, contributed by willing participants and “compiled in a formless shape.”5 As I looked at them, hanging on the wall, I observed they shone, glossy, under the exhibition lights. Devoid of eye holes, there was a barrier to the usage of the masks. To put them on would cast the wearer in total darkness. It would make them impermeable to algorithmic recognition, but vulnerable to physical violence and incident. Wearable versions of the masks made for performances feature small eye holes, but I imagined the user’s spatial awareness would be severely impacted. I wondered about their experience of light.

An Introduction to Light, Darkness, and Visibility

A Western cultural inscription of lightness and darkness insists that light brightens and illuminates, and the dark conceals and dooms. But, like most concepts that assert a black-and-white system of truth, the declaration that light equals “good” and dark equals “bad” is a binary that is easy to disturb. German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk does just this in his remarks on metaphysics, mysticism, and the politics of light, writing, “...Where there is too much light, there is too much shadow, where there is too much light, darkness prevails.”6

The fault Sloterdijk finds in the binary of light and darkness in knowledge can be applied to the ways light and darkness operate within surveillance cultures today. The colonial inscription falters when we consider that surveillance culture relies so heavily on a panoptic7 usage of light, on using light to surveil and flatten nuance and individuality; to emotionally darken. From light pollution and the loss of night, to the increased “informatics visibility”8 of existing online, a more physical darkness is being obliterated and replaced by sterile, blinding light. In his description of Jeremy Bentham’s prison surveillance panopticon, philosopher Michel Foucault writes, “Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.”9 Under the spotlight of surveillance, light becomes threatening, and darkness becomes a refuge. New surveillance technologies thus invert the physical and the metaphysical definitions of light and darkness. It is unsurprising, then, that artists have turned to the technologies that support surveillance states, reappropriating or distorting their primary purpose in order “to relentlessly reassert the individual, exceptional, abnormal, and marginalized in radically contingent detail.”10 What can Blas’s use of light and darkness in Facial Weaponization Suite illuminate about the complexities of contemporary visibility within and beyond surveillance art?

Figure 1: Blas and friends perform “Militancy, Vulnerability, Obfuscation, tableau vivant,” with the Performative Nanorobotics Lab, University of California, San Diego, photo by Tanner Cook (2013), wearing Mask - May 31, 2013, San Diego, CA.

I use the term “contemporary visibility” to refer to the way visibility is understood in the present, as well as how I anticipate it will shift and expand to adapt to changing social and technological landscapes. The Italian sociologist and theorist Andrea Mubi Brighenti argues that the “difference between the two meanings of the visible [is not] one of nature but of degree and more properly… of different regimes of visibility.”11 Brighenti suggests that visibility is not a matter of total blindness or sight, but instead, its complexity can be described as a difference of degree. Brighenti also establishes a precedent for linking surveillance art to visibility movements, writing, “surveillance art can be interpreted as an attempt to deal with issues of social visibility and invisibility, and, more specifically, with contemporary visibility regimes.”12 Brighenti introduces the term “visibility regimes” to explain how surveillance societies weaponize visibility through biometric and online data gathering and public surveillance via cameras and recording. Regimes describe the various methods of data collection in a surveillance state. I believe an examination of light and darkness in Zach Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite (2012-2014) will contribute observations on biometric in/visibility in surveillance art. The term “surveillance art” in this essay refers to art that somehow comments on or refers to our surveillance culture, but additionally, the artist I discuss employs surveillance technologies in order to materially confront them.

Visibility today has a polysemous reality. It exists somewhere on/between/within a social theory visibility and a surveillance visibility. Drawing on Brighenti’s observations of degrees of visibility in social theory, I observe that Facial Weaponization Suite mediates a polysemic contemporary visibility by operating on what I have dubbed a gradient of darkness; where the harsh lines between light and dark are blurred and there is no simple distinction between visible and invisible. In this space of undulating glow, in the dusk of seeing and being seen, Blas’s project faces the pressing threat of “too much light” and the limits of a total retaliatory darkness.

Figure 2: Zach Blas, Fag Face Mask (2012), installation detail at Risky Business, the HTMlles 10: Feminist festival of media arts + digital culture, Studio XX, Montreal, Canada (2012). Retrieved from zachblas.info/works/facial-weaponization-suite, June 2025

Opacity: an Aesthetic of Darkness?

In interviews and writing, Blas has shared that with Facial Weaponization Suite he aimed to create a materialization of Edouard Glissant’s concept of opacity.13 Art historian Lila Lee-Morrison argues that Blas applies Glissant’s opacity to the language of data production and “specifically the surveilling of bodies and the transformation of physical embodiment into data.”14 Glissant’s opacity concept outlines the right of people to be untranslatable and retain their difference or unknowability. It is not to be confused with obscurity, says professor of Africana studies Benjamin P. Davis, and is rather more in line with an “irreducibility” or a rejection of transparency.15 Transparency allows for light to penetrate the subject, and opacity blocks that perception. Opacity in Blas’s work can thereby be interpreted as an assertion of darkness as a way to combat the knowability of surveillant light.

In Facial Weaponization Suite, Blas takes the facial material that surveillance technologies use to authenticate us as human and therefore identifiable, and abstracts it. Under Blas’s masks, the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth are disappeared under the combined data of many eyes, ears, noses, and mouths. The artist uses aggregate biometric data to construct “amorphous masks” that surveillance technologies fail to recognize as human.16 Lee-Morrison says that in the series of masks, Blas “renders a kind of play between full-on visibility and concealment” where “he is pinpointing the face as a site of politics.”17 If the face is susceptible to surveillant light, which seeks to know and understand in order to categorize, then in Facial Weaponization Suite, Blas absorbs and deflects this light to make the face nonsensical. He turns the darkness of opacity into something materially dark, blocking light that would help the eye recognize a subject, so the identifiable face is replaced by a shiny mass of color.

In Benjamin P. Davis’s reading of Glissant, Davis sees “opacity as an achievement.”18 Davis offers language that helps us think of opacity and darkness as a goal that ripples to disturb the seeing and knowing precept of subjugation. With this understanding of darkness or opacity as an achievement, the emphasis of success shifts away from what concealing the face achieves. What happens behind the mask or because of the mask is of less concern than creating the opaque veil in the first place. The achievement is the darkness itself. Blas himself writes about what he calls a queer darkness, which he defines as “the refusal to cohere, to become legible, to see like a state… [it] is a ‘startling absence,’ a disappearance, a refusal to be.”19 By thinking about Blas’s rejection of transparency in this way, we better align Blas’s work and queer darkness with an opacity that Asbjø Skarsvåg Grønstad defines as “an approach, an attitude – and possibly even an aesthetics – that seeks to safeguard a subject or a phenomenon against a threat of reducibility.”20 Grønstad’s suggestion of an aesthetics of opacity raises the following questions: Is darkness a defining feature of an aesthetics of opacity? Is light the enemy of opacity, or is transparency? Are these words synonymous or oppositional?

Figure 3: Zach Blas, Mask - May 31, 2013, San Diego, CA, (2013). Retrieved from zachblas.info/works/facial-weaponization-suite, June 2025

Contradictions and Potentialities in Light, Darkness, and Visibility

I believe Zach Blas revolts against surveillant light by treating darkness as a goal in Facial Weaponization Suite. Blas’s concept of queer darkness,21 exemplified in his Facial Weaponization Suite, offers an alternative to visibility as control22 by intercepting perception. Darkness becomes an aesthetics of opacity within a “contemporary technopolitical landscape of pervasive surveillance technologies and data accumulation.”23 But what does this use of darkness tell us about contemporary visibility? Lila Lee-Morrison says that this landscape “inverts the political agency of visibility,” and that this inversion “in turn produces an alternative form of contemporary political agency that is rooted in the claim to the right not to be visible, the right not to be recognizable or made vulnerable to exposure.”24

To return to Brighenti, the theorist suggests that visibility exists in two oppositional forms within regimes of visibility: visibility as recognition and visibility as control.25 And yet, Facial Weaponization Suite is arguably not very “dark” in the sense that it does not strip masked individuals of recognition or joy, and in fact, when in practice, the masks appear to empower individuals to act collectively and recognize each other as sharing in surveillance resistance efforts (figure 3). Blas himself says, “...a mask does not simply hide a face but evokes collective love; an autonomous network fails to cohere to the corporate internet as we know it but opens shadowy communicative potential.”26 This is where I believe thinking in a gradient of darkness is helpful, as it describes the way the spectrum of visibility is navigated in surveillance art, and how Blas achieves darkness as an aesthetic to describe this relationship.

Blas’s masks vary in color and texture; they don’t invisibilize the wearer to the world as much as they draw scrutiny and attention while protecting their identity. They are also not all visibly dark. Two of the masks are brightly colored, and all three are made of a semi-reflective plastic that causes them to shine under exhibition lighting. They are unifying and mock homogenization through data collection, almost by satirizing an algorithmic visibility. Blas’s work represents a “struggle for opacity” that simultaneously acknowledges that “transparency, visibility, and representation to the state should be used tactically” and also that “they are never the end goal for transformative politics but are, ultimately, a trap.”27

Figure 4: Fag Face Scanning Station, reclaim:pride with the ONE Archives and RECAPS Magazine, Cristopher Street West Pride Festival, West Hollywood, CA, photo by David Evans Frantz (2013). Retrieved from zachblas.info, June 2025

A Gradient of Darkness

Working on the gradient of darkness, Blas darkens the face but leaves the body free to move and assert itself. The gradient of darkness separates itself from other concepts like Andrea Mubi Brighenti’s “degrees of visibility,” by focusing on the relationship between visibility and art and aesthetics. Imagine a gradient. Is the image your mind conjures a plane where two stark and opposing colors or shades intermingle and fade into each other? The gradient is inherently visible; unlike a degree, it exists as a part of visual culture, not simply conceptually but physically and materially. A gradient of darkness also specifically speaks to surveillance art and its relationship to lightness. A gradient suggests balance, a co-mingling, something of substance that is not wholly one thing or totally another. While surveillance is inherently reliant on light and its physicality, darkness cannot be the sole intervention into the Western surveillance machine. Because the West relies on light’s equivalency to hope, I can not see that Blas’s black and white assertion in “Queer Darkness” will sustain a fight against an algorithmic distillation of identity using biometrics capture. That is, I think there is space and possibility for more than “a fog of illegibility, an opaque being, a nonidentifiable collective presence,”28 where individuals can exist and be seen and known within and beyond their communities.

Perhaps it is simply a fault in our language that, without the metaphorical light of progress and hope, resistance efforts can be difficult to sustain. Even Blas’s work, which aims to create darkness or blackness and face the physical systems of surveillance, does so through creating community networks of collective biometric refusal and resistance. However, by calling this theoretical plane a gradient of darkness rather than a gradient of light, I also acknowledge the value and merit of Zach Blas’s argument for darkness as protective and resistant.

Figure 5: Feminist Imperceptibilities, performance, The New Romantics, curated by Claudia Hart, Nicholas O’Brien, and Katie Torn, Eyebeam, New York, NY, photo by Christine Butler (2014). Retrieved from zachblas.info, June 2025.

Is it possible to achieve a darkness that is light, that is illuminating, that is not oppressive and obstructing like the spotlight, like the floodlights, like the glowing eye of Big Brother? In his essay/chapter “To See in the Dark,” visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff suggests it is. Mirzoeff writes that seeing in the dark “is the way of seeing of the watched, not the watchers, in those moments outside and beyond surveillance.”29 Mirzoeff does not forgo light entirely to explain a “beyond surveillance”; he acknowledges there is an imperative to see. Light shines through blockages; it peers in; it makes the peering possible. Light is embedded in our Western understanding of truth, seeing, and knowing. Therefore, there must be an acknowledgment that light is not entirely abandoned in Zach Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite if its purpose is also to generate knowledge and reveal the threat of biometric surveillance. Mirzoeff writes: “Seeing in the dark is the practice of solidarity, the means by which to see how colonialism is practiced.”30 Artists like Blas still incorporate a light-sensitive visibility in their surveillance artworks, as they are primarily made in response to Western systems, or their colonial arms, by those who oppose them. Blas is also highly engaged in visibilizing injustices and threats to human dignity and autonomy, like in Mask - May 19, Mexico City, Mexico (figure 6).31

Figure 6: Zach Blas, Mask - May 19, Mexico City, Mexico, in Procession of Biometric Sorrows, public action, Mexico City, Mexico, photo by Oliver Santana (2014). Retrieved from zachblas.info, June 2025.

Blas’s masks, which obfuscate the face from surveillance systems, do make visible (and tangible) problems that are interwoven with visibility in a surveillance culture. It is part of their purpose. They provoke a questioning, a turn of the head to find the closest camera, a consideration of the invisible presence of surveillance technologies and the culture that sustains their demand. I believe it is necessary for the purpose of this paper to recognize that Zach Blas is a white, cisgender, gay American male, whose work primarily circulates in the Western world. While Blas and other decolonial scholars make beautiful and convincing arguments about the potential of darkness as opacity, I also believe that the emotional affect of light remains ingrained in our cultural experience of viewing and understanding art, including surveillance art. It is a part of Western interpretive practice, however flawed that instinct might be.

However, I also believe in the potential of light to be more than threatening. As Tim Edensor writes in his examination of light art and affect, “Light engenders continuous adaptation, provoking affective and emotional resonances, cajoling bodies into movement, activating passions, instigating sensual pleasures and discomforts.”32 Zach Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite does just that; it engenders adaptation, provokes affective and emotional resonances, and is built on a foundational goal of mobilization via community-based action and protective refusal. Even when defined by efforts to darken, the work aims to achieve darkness, gain it, provide it, and convert it into light. Facial Weaponization Suite demonstrates that light is not the limit of visibility, that darkness might be what moderates or mediates our engagement with being seen, being known, and seeing and knowing others. Light is energy and potential; it’s “an intangible element that permits the visual illusion of the extension of our senses and the energy of our body to unimagined spaces.”33 A gradient of darkness helps us reconcile the complicated inversions and contradictions of light, darkness, and visibility in and beyond34 Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite. We cannot have darkness without light, and we must use them both to see in the dark.35

Figure 7: Zach Blas, Fag Face Mask, (2011), Fag Face Scanning Station, reclaim:pride with the ONE Archives and RECAPS Magazine, Christopher Street West Pride Festival, West Hollywood, CA, photo by David Evans Frantz (2013). Retrieved June 2025.

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