This panel explores intersections between human bodies and formal systems in the twentieth-century. The panel cuts across the history of forensics, mathematics, computing, and dance in order to demonstrate how different communities have worked to erase bodies, represent bodies, control bodies, identify bodies, and classify bodies through formalization. We recover and reconstruct the technologies, practices, aesthetics, and politics that inform twentieth-century formalisms, so often touted as neutral abstractions. Kelly Gates’ paper explores Alphonse Bertillon’s crime-scene photographs, their place in his forensic classification project and their recent resurgence as a subject of museum exhibition, emphasizing the historical significance of police uses of photography. Clare Kim demonstrates how formal axiomatic methods developed in early twentieth-century mathematics were used to erase racial and cultural difference among mathematicians, especially within American efforts to appropriate Chinese and Japanese mathematics. Stephanie Dick explores early efforts to formalize and automate facial recognition at the University of Texas at Austin, the problematic norms built into this software, and the competing standards of identification that surrounded its use. And Whitney Laemmli investigates an attempt to formalize movement and dance in the mid-twentieth century that had the effect of erasing the creative contributions of dancers themselves. Together, these papers explore how race, creativity, criminality, and identity have been encoded in formal systems, those hallmarks of modernity, through particular configurations of technology, practice, politics, and aesthetics.
