The Art of Identification

The practical identification of individuals has, in the modern period, taken a number of forms - from Early Modern badges and insignia to the contemporary strobe light of a retinal scanner. The term 'identification' can also be taken to mean a number of things, including the determination of individual personhood via paperwork, bodily examination, verbal testimony, and digital recording; the detection of false or forged identities; the creation of offender profiles by forensic psychologists; and the taxonomic (and later genetic) tracing of ethnic 'types'. This subject has been of recent interest in historical, social scientific and biological scholarship. However, what has been neglected to date is the inherent connections that exist between techniques of identification (as defined above) and the intimate personal identity divulged by literary and artistic representation. The question of who we are, in the practical sense of identifying individuals via their documents and bodies, has remained curiously absent from the question of who we are in terms of our intimate portrayal of the self.

This research network will seek to redress this discrepancy by examining the papers of identity documents alongside a range of written and visual media and thereby advance a fresh interpretive model for the consideration of both identificatory practices and the artistic depiction of identity. The broad spectrum of participants speaks to the interdisciplinary nature of the project and its ability to resonate across different areas of study and practice. To achieve its objectives, the network will advance conversation and collaboration via a series of four day-long workshops its website and twitter feed. The online activities will involve the dissemination of research questions, potential reading lists and thematic concerns prior to workshops and the publishing of papers and discussion topics following the workshops. Postgraduate students and early career researchers will form an integral part of the workshop and help to sustain its ongoing existence and development.

The first workshop, at the University of Cambridge, will focus on the theme of 'image and information' and address the central first question of how identity documents can be interpreted as cultural artifacts that connect with artistic representations of identity. The second workshop, at the University of Illinois, will move on to think more specifically about the site of many identificatory practices - the human body - and consider its relationship to the kinds of bodies depicted in art and literature. The third workshop, at the University of Birmingham, will bring together academics, practitioners of forensic science and a range of creative practioners in order to consider the ways in which their varying models of identity could be brought to bear on each other. The fourth and final workshop, held at the Library of Birmingham, will comprise a working meeting between key members of the network steering group and museum professionals, curators and archivists. Building on the content of these workshops, the aim of the meeting will be to develop a conceptual framework which will accommodate the various interdisciplinary and professional approaches to identification and identity developed by the network. This framework will actively develop a rationale for reading a host of different identity documents as works of art, thereby realizing a huge potential within various archival material held in locations such as the Library of Birmingham. The stimulation of new creative work will also be addressed with the inclusion of practicing writers and artists.

Practitioners of Identification.
Workshop 3 will bring practitioners of identification techniques (forensic scientists and psychologists) into contact with academics and creative writers and artists. This confrontation of working practices will facilitate the active questioning of the creative and fictional components of analytical, factually-based, methods and vice versa. By facilitating discussions between these groups practitioners of identification will benefit from the opportunity to inform those groups who are most responsible for the public image of forensics in contemporary society - thereby contributing to the authenticity with which creative practitioners represent forensic activity. Reversing this, the confrontation of ideas referred to above will encourage practitioners of identification to reflect upon their own practices in an original way. The creative aspect of forensic profiling (the fact that it involves the imaginative modeling of individuality) is one particular aspect that the workshop will bring out, thus allowing for a potentially altered perspective to be brought to bear upon working practices. The academic perspective offered by key participants of the network from humanities disciplines (with their attendant methodologies and assumptions about agency and subjectivity) will contribute a further layer to the questioning of forensic technique by its practitioners.

Creative Practitioners
In a related outcome to the above, creative writers (fiction, TV and film) and artists will, via the interaction with professionals in forensic science and psychology, be faced with new ways of questioning their own depictions of self-identity. Assumptions about the working practices of forensic scientists will thus be addressed and clarified via the sharing of working practices - up-to-date information on forensic techniques offering new ideas with which to depict identity in contemporary media. Bringing both of these groups into contact with academics from a range of disciplines with further enhance this enquiry. This will occur firstly because scholarly research from, for example, the disciplines of history and literary studies consider 'identity' in often quite different terms to either each other or common usage - they can thus offer additional layers of meaning which can be mined by creative practitioners. Secondly, the interdisciplinary nature of the AI network will allow for these diverse academic ideas to be questioned themselves, thereby realising new and original approaches to the contemporary identity depicted by creative practitioners.

Museum Curators and Professionals
Key members of this group will have been invited to all of the first three workshops and their inclusion will culminate in Workshop 4. Exposing those involved in the recording and archiving of various forms of identity documents (identity cards, photographs, prison records, census materials) and artifacts (anthropometric measuring devices, fingerprint specimens, human remains) to the ideas generated by the network will allow these practitioners to review their holdings with a fresh perspective. Workshop 4 will then actively develop a conceptual framework which will accommodate the various interdisciplinary and professional approaches to identification and identity developed by the network. This framework will promote a rationale for reading a host of different identity documents and artifacts in ways that emphasise not only their aesthetic value but also their key role in the creation of self-idenity as we think of it today. Huge potential within collections in locations such as the Library of Birmingham (where workshop 4 will be held) and the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge will therefore be activated.