A joint project
by Sebastian Sãraru
and Sylvia Yeftinenko
under the kind supervision of Lt. Colonel
Vasile Bosenaru.
Registrul Centralizat de Fizionomii
The Central Physiognomy Registry
Unveiling a less known aspect of totalitarian practice in Eastern Europe in the eighties
Bogdan Achimescu provides the showcase for our project.
He wishes to thank the Context Network.
The Context Network is grateful to The
Ministry of Culture and Cults.
Last but not least, we are all indebted to Luize Kumpelschrecker.
Without her invaluable contribution this project would never see the light
of projectors, the glow of monitors and the shine of fame.
This is a contribution to the growing information database about Eastern
European history of the eighties, with an emphasis on Oasan matters.
[...]
Here is what our group was up to:
We worked for several years, trying to compile a database containing the faces of all people in Romania: the Registrul Centralizat de Fizionomii (Central Physiognomy Registry), in short RCF.
Because computers were quite primitive at the time when our project started, we initially chose a peerless technique that involved collecting traditional photographs and hand-drawing a net of lines and points that described the facial characteristics of a given person.
The advantages of this method (called AV from Amprenta Vectoriala - Vectorial Fingerprint) were obvious in the era when our best machines were 128 kilobytes Coral computers, the size of locomotives. The physiognomy of a person was thus reduced to a simple series of digits describing several Bezier curves. This allowed us to predict, even with our limited computing powers, how a person would look - say - thirty years later. A simple equation allowed us to simulate the progress of baldness, the way lips would curve over a now toothless jaw or the way noses change shape with age.
Prof. Corcoran (a personal friend of St. Lem, by the way) took over our department from where we left it when we switched to voice recognition and conversation archiving. His vision took our project on a whole new orbit. We are of course proud we could contribute to early stages of his oeuvre.
Although his project
is well documented and now famous, we think we can offer a few insights
not covered by other publications.
Prof. Corcoran's idea was simple:
We can predict, based on the movements of several vectors and the change
of some bitmaps (easily sampled and boxed into several categories: soft
skin, dark skin, curly hair, shiny skull, wrinkled temple, etc), how will
a person look in future. Ergo, observing humans and re-photographing them
for surveillance use becomes a waist of time and resources.
It is worth mentioning that by the time this idea surfaced we already
had superior infrastructure and software that allowed automatic Vectorial
Fingerprint generating.
The above
meant in practice that an entire revolution was about to happen. Let us
point out only a few of its aspects:
1. No more need to update ID cards to match the person's aging
face.
2. No more need to create new ID's for children born to couples that are
referenced by the RCF database. Computing the parent's physiognomies according
to several age, race and gender variables can generate their AV's. Collateral
advantage: quick identification of extra-marital descendants.
3. In a further stage, after acquiring additional computing power, possessing
a population becomes futile for the State.
Automatic production and distribution facilities take care of economical
balance. Audiovisual material generated by proprietary software (with
pre-loaded RCF-based, self-evolving generations of portraits) ensures
a proper image for external PR and provides arguments against nosy foreign "human rights watch" infiltrators.
Alas, this visionary work was interrupted by the political turmoil of the early nineties. It is only with great satisfaction that we notice the clear re-birth of a great idea: the new unified world seems to be leaning towards the same kind of endeavor.
Our project is an artistic one, despite what our critics have written (see Carta Valahica 4/2000, also our reply in the subsequent issue no. 5). While we are aware of the historiographical and human implication of the information we are unveiling, we do feel a pleasant creative irresponsibility in doing so. We do not worry about damaging the described direction of research by early publicity. It is our strong belief that, sooner or later, humankind will walk along, warned or not, willing or unwilling, aware or unaware.