Le Portrait Parlé de Personnes Inexistantes /
A Spoken Portrait of Non-existing People (2025)
Developed by Alphonse Bertillon, a French criminologist and biometrics researcher, Portrait Parlé was a set of standardized methods for describing traits like face shape, nose type, or eye color. In the early 20th century, Paul Otlet, today considered the father of information science and open knowledge, proposed streamlining this system and its distribution by deploying telegraphic technology. Consequently, in 1907, Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, a disciple of Bertillon, developed a telegraphic code for the efficient conversion and transmission of information from Bertillon's spoken portrait system to facilitate the international surveillance of suspected individuals.
This artwork aims to make a connection between this obsolete system and today’s pervasive technologies of biometric reduction of human identities,
largely aided by contemporary network technologies and AI developments.
Extracted from the portraits of people who don’t exist, but are generated by AI (via thispersondoesnotexist.com), biometric data is converted into Bertillon's system and subsequently sent as Morse code to a telegraphic sounder from the end of the 19th century, which then prints the received 'portrait' as a continuous sequence of dashes and dots.
Besides commenting on the genealogies of today’s biometric data technologies and their distribution systems, the piece can also be experienced as a generative soundscape composition. Within it, the amplified microcurrents of computational processes merge with a restored soundscape of historical law enforcement offices, where a continuous—and often flawed—streams of sonified dashes and dots were believed to convey real people’s identities—literally, their portraits.
The piece was developed for Relational Technologies, Technological Relations, interdisciplinary assembly on existential challenges of AI and biometrics at Färgfabriken, Stockholm,
between February 6 and March 2, 2025.
You can read more about the event here
The project was developed in collaboraton with
Max Björverud , a creative audio technologist working in the realm of audio and interaction art.
