This is the second instalment of a new monthly column from The National Grid, a graphic design journal based in Aotearoa currently edited by Luke Wood, Matt Galloway, and Katie Kerr. 

The white van occupies a cycle lane, with red barricades positioned in front and at the rear of the vehicle. Within the barricades, tall silver tripods with surveillance cameras perched atop cover sight lines up and down the street. On the roof of the van, a T-shaped powder-coated steel structure holds four pupil-like glass orbs, each housing a camera capable of swivelling 360 degrees. The cameras are linked together by yellow wires which feed down onto a purpose-built metal tray fixed to the roof of the van. The tray holds various other instruments; a white disk that could be some sort of modem, LED lights, and toward the front, what looks like more cameras, this time in grey casing. The yellow wires continue down the side of the vehicle and into a silver control panel. The van door is open and inside; more wires and the silhouetted form of a person sitting on a swivel chair, headphones on, monitoring screens. 

Outside, officers stand beside each barricade, and as I look around Oxford St, I see a couple more roaming within earshot. There’s signage on the side and back of the vehicle; set in small, nondescript sans serif; “Live Facial Recognition In Operation” and underneath, the blue and white logo of London Metropolitan Police.

I am a tourist here, in a sea of people pushing their way up or down the street, in and out of shops. Within this flow, I stop for a moment, to consider this symbol of modern surveillance. 

Facial recognition technology involves the assessment of biometric data – the distance between the eyes, length of the nose and forehead, and the curvature of cheekbones. The combination of these features can be as unique as a fingerprint, and the birth of this technique (as far back as the 1960s) involved researchers mapping facial features manually. Now, the rise of A.I. technologies allows for this sea of faces on a busy London street to be scanned instantaneously, while complex neural networks cross-reference each face with vast photo databases. There’s an aesthetic assessment central to these systems that only promises to become more sophisticated by learning and corroborating particular body movements; the gait and posture of a walk, the slope of the shoulder; all these distinct micro-traits that identify us in relation to the other. Like how I can figure out which member of my family is coming down the stairs by the rhythm of their steps. These definable, but almost abstract patterns that help to define us. 

What’s more, this technology is everywhere; within the minutes leading up to seeing this van, I’d likely scanned my face anyway; to open my phone or access my digital credit card. Days earlier, I’d presented my passport at an autonomous station, followed the prompts on screen to look directly at the overhead camera, and let it scan my biometrics – confirming my identity with an efficiency far beyond a human customs officer. And I was happy for it – for the lack of airport security lines, lack of questioning, for the smooth, streamlined travel experience. My family and I joked about it too – how willingly we let the border control systems have all that information. 

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about participation – the philosophical notion of it. That our technological present increasingly requires participation, whether we like it or not. How my own attitude to this participation has been that of the knowingly wilful – take it all, I don’t care, have my search history, have my card details, know what I buy, know what I like, notice which posts I pause on, even if I don’t acknowledge them with a like or repost. My data and metadata floating around out there, being collected, stored. I’ve enjoyed the privilege of allowing all of this to remain in that abstract place, outside of consideration.

And more than ever, there is an A.I. creep embedded into these technologies. It’s in surveillance systems rolled out across Britain, despite facial recognition failing to be referenced in any act of Parliament; and despite research that has consistently identified the technology’s susceptibility toward false positives when scanning people of colour. Meanwhile in China, fixed facial recognition systems watch every moment, and triangulate with data surveillance to make it virtually impossible not to have one’s every action known. And in Aotearoa, facial recognition surveillance is being trialled across supermarket chains and other large retailers, while NZ Police have used the technology in a limited capacity since 2022, despite not having a facial recognition policy until August 2024.

Standing there, watching the white van watch me, aspects of the abstractness of these surveillance apparatus began to melt away. Here it is, manifested in purpose-built steel and glass and plastics and wiring. And I was just another face to collect, to register and move on from within the sea. I wonder if it takes more note of faces that take obvious note of it. I realise it might have at least cross-referenced my face with the one that entered the country via Heathrow a few days earlier.

Part of why this experience felt so confronting was the way it made the A.I. creep so tangible; pulling it from the abstract. In doing so, it also symbolised how designed systems and infrastructures frame and facilitate our participation in the world; governing notions of what feels possible, what feels permissible, what feels out of reach. Often, this facilitation plays out in such understated ways; I can’t stop thinking about the cold, corporate nature of the “Live Facial Recognition In Operation” sign on the side of the surveillance van. It looked more like a pull-quote from some sort of annual report than a public notice implicating the state of civil liberties in Britain. 

Graphic Design critic Rick Poyner has this quote from the documentary Helvetica that I come back to time and again about the responsibility of giving form to language; that graphic design is the communication framework through which we understand messages about both what the world is, and what it could be. The overwhelming message inferred through the visual treatment of the signage on that white van was one of understated, stamped authority, and the notion that ‘there’s nothing to see here, everything is in order’. These are the layers of meaning stacked into the visual and technological systems that usher us through reality; they dictate how we might participate in the world and – more so than ever – they are watching our participation too. 

I cross Oxford Street to a vacant public seat. Within a minute of doing so, activity near the van heightens. Two police officers are walking briskly in my direction to catch up with a 30ish-year-old man about to walk past me and down an alleyway. The officers arrive on either side of the man, startling him. The police are asking to talk to him. The officer closest to me is explaining to the man that they are running a routine facial recognition sweep in the area, and that his face has been identified by the system. The man is shaking his head, looking confused. The man is suddenly running, an officer pushed to the ground, a second officer in pursuit. Additional cops appear in the alleyway, the man changes direction, is running straight at me, is tackled to the ground just before the public seating, he is up again, half away, and then shoved into an open doorway, surrounded by officers, face pressed against the wall, cuffed, led away. Momentarily dispersed, the sea of people resumes its flow.