The measurement of fingerprints began over a hundred years ago, in India, when a local police department began to use the shapes in fingerprints to organize police files instead of person�s names. It was
a large step towards more efficient criminal investigation but it was also a rudimentary step towards a new kind of visual language.

Vil�m Flusser wrote about a transition from written language to a visual language in Die Schrift.

�Writing, in the sense of the lining-up of letters and other writing signs, seems to have no future or almost none. In the meantime, there are codes that transmit information better than writing signs. What has been written until now can be better transferred on tapes, records, films, ideotapes, picture discs, or diskettes. And much of what could not be written until now can be recorded in these new codes. The information that is coded thus is more convenient to produce, to transport, to receive, and to store than written texts. In the future, with the help of the new codes, we will be better able to correspond, make science, talk about politics, write poetry, and philosophize than we are in the alphabet or in Arab figures (Vil�m Flusser, Schrift).�

In But where danger is� the transition from the fingerprint to the fence was made with the use of a computer. I wrote a GUI (graphical user interface) to a unix-style application for creating image mosaics
called Metapixel. This enabled me to experiment in a more visually oriented way to create mosaics, but instead of using hundreds of source images I only used one image of a fingerprint. This image was chopped up according to a grid and remapped onto the photograph of the fence according to the shapes, tones and hues recognized in both images as a
matching pair.

Besides the commercialization of the technique, there is little practical use for this kind of image recognition and my fingerprint database becomes passive, no longer able to aid authorities in the control of identity. In another aspect the orderly matrix of computer recognized image fragments and the archival preservation of
prints mounted to aluminum sheets parallels the authority's identity databases; either it removes the sole ownership of identity from the authority or I have become an authority - there is no escape.