Pixel, Partition, Persona: Machine Vision and Face Recognition in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between machine vision, face recognition and affect in Kazuo Ishiguro’s speculative fiction novel Klara and the Sun (2021). It explores the ways that Ishiguro’s novel enacts, stages, and dramatises cognitive and emotional acts of comprehension and empathy through ‘face reading’. The article takes up Guillemette Bolen’s theorisation of ‘kinesic imagination’ and Sianne Ngai’s concept of ‘ugly feelings’ to investigate the affective and representational dilemmas of technological face recognition in speculative fiction. Through the careful treatment of literary language, itself a complex response to rapidly evolving technology, Klara and the Sun presents instances of affective subtlety, hesitation, ambiguity, mutability, confusion and deficit to solicit an emotional response in the reader concerning the sociotechnical reception and future possibilities of machine vision and facial recognition technologies. In this way, Ishiguro’s novel offers a timely challenge to the algorithmic design principles of face-recognition technology due to its complex affective (rather than purely categorical) treatment of both human and non-human faces.