PATTERN RECOGNITION took place virtually on Thursday, 21 January 2021. This colloquium considered the multiple ways in which systems of law and governance interface with their publics.
Democratic values such as those contained in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and human rights conventions are increasingly being sidelined, as print media and verbal communication shifts to digitized visual vocabularies and quantitative methods of prediction. In some cases, black letter law and established modes of address—and redress—have been displaced altogether by visual regimes (like surveillance camera networks and facial recognition software) or numeric narratives (including the algorithmic assessments of credit worthiness, medical predispositions, and probability of criminal recidivism).
These parallel universes operate according to their own logic, creating referential and connotative systems in which notions of truth, justice, and fairness are dangerously reconfigured. Such insidious technological and discursive shifts impose new and often impermeable categories of race, gender, and class that reinforce existing lines of segregation, while their decision-making power operates outside the traditional realm of accountability defined by jurisprudential notions of human agency. The aim of the colloquium was to decipher the norms embedded in the syntax and semantics of justice as a system of governance, and to expose the hidden violence operating in these new genres of expression.
