Proof of Life: The Biopolitics of Visual Media

Abstract

This study outlines a genealogy of media that claim to prove something about human life. It draws on archival and historiographical research to analyze interactions between photography, the history of statistics, activist art and video, public health crises, and digital media. Across a series of case studies spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the dissertation argues that visual media emerges as a biopolitical tool for governing populations in tandem with new forms of biometric surveillance that work to structure space and movement. The chapters examine the relationship between photography, social reform, and statistics; the role of aesthetics in AIDS activist media, art, and public health campaigns; the history of biosurveillance in relation to the cultural and political imaginaries that emerged after the completion of the Human Genome Project; and the role of contemporary artists in understanding how the body is reconceptualized—or reformatted—as an object for the extraction of data within regimes of “surveillance capitalism.” The concluding chapter looks to early experiments with responsive environments in artificial intelligence research to contextualize productive encounters between statistical science, cybernetics, architectural design, and organizational management in the mid-twentieth century that implemented multimedia surveillance as a mechanism of control—encounters that continue to influence the ideological aims and technical operations of contemporary therapeutic and assistive digital tools. By focusing on the diagnostic aspect of biometric capture and visual surveillance in relation to risk management, the dissertation frames media as an unexpected technique and tool of biopolitical governance. Across chapters, Proof of Life: The Biopolitics of Visual Media introduces the concept of "biosurveillance media"—media forms designed to surveil, track, and quantify the body. The dissertation contributes to a critical body of scholarship in film and media studies and the history of technology that unravels the fraught relationship between media technologies, political agency, and the governance of human life.