A Horse in the Archive: Notes on Incompleteness in Biometric Infrastructures

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by kayah can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/a-horse-in-the-archive-notes-on-incompleteness-in-biometric-infrastructures/. About the post: An essay on incompleteness as a constitutive property of biometric infrastructures. Beginning with the removal of two wisdom teeth — a piece of the body that leaves it once but whose record may keep circulating — it traces how bodies are decomposed into data, archived, and returned to their subjects only in fragments that never quite align. At its center is a speculative biometric archive, built as an interactive component, that enacts this logic directly: records repeat, some accesses are denied, and discovered records decay permanently with use. A horse the system cannot classify — but files anyway — marks the limit of what such an archive can hold. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)