“Intrigued But Resistant” — those were the words that flashed above my face on the wallsize screen when I first entered the room housing “Taken,” one of two video installations that comprise the show “Profiling” at the Whitney Museum. Ah, yes: For once I’d been labeled accurately.

Who wouldn’t be intrigued by an exhibition dedicated to visual profiling through surveillance? It is, admittedly, an especially timely subject, but then again, surveillance as a format for video art is not particularly novel: People have been producing similarly themed projects for more than 30 years, and, with a concept as potentially gimmicky as surveillance, that’s long enough for the artists to become repetitive and the critics at least slightly resistant. Of course, profiling has a much longer history than surveillance art, and its roots reach down into some swampy ground indeed. Contemporary profiling techniques inevitably hearken back to the misguided attempts by 19th-century forensic specialists (phrenologists among them) to discern criminal “types” in facial and other physical characteristics. The artists included here imply that our own specialists proceed from similarly blinkered assumptions about what can be read into gestures, tics, and physical traits. And, these artists suggest, even when our specialists make such assumptions in the name of security, it should not protect them from explosive lampooning.

Of the two works on view, David Rokeby’s “Taken” (2002) is the more straight-faced. Two videos of activity of people in the gallery are projected side-by-side on a large wall. On the right, recordings of visitors’ movements are looped at 20-second intervals. We see them in an abstracted representation of the gallery space, through a yellow-orange light: A portly man, with only a fringe of hair on his pate, waves his arms about while approaching the wall and scrutinizing his image on it; a woman behind him lifts her arms triumphantly as, behind her, a critic in a T-shirt scribbles on a notepad. When the individuals move, behind them trail the ghost images endemic to low-grade security equipment.

On the left is a grid of 200 black-and-white headshots of visitors, presented in slow motion, although each “portrait” is too blurry for one to discern small details like the shape of an eye or mouth. Periodically, the camera zooms in on one head, and the software assigns it a classification. After receiving the “Intrigued But Resistant” tag, I returned several times and was determined to be “Carried Away,” “Slightly Paranoid,” “Implicated,” “Unsettled,” and “Disappointed.” Meant to satirize the sorts of facial-recognition software now being installed at airports and other high-security locations, the adjectives in “Taken” are in fact randomly assigned and have no basis in what a given visitor looks like or does.

Nevertheless, I was somewhat disappointed. True, the grid of faces wittily recalled the work of any number of recent portraitists, from Andy Warhol to Gerhard Richter; the assigned adjectives were amusing, and the recording of visitors’ movements did create an appealing, painterly tableau. Yet a room-size installation should do more than parody and comment — it should carry you away.

The other work on view, “SVEN—Surveillance Video Entertainment Network” (2006), by Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma, and Vincent Rabaud, with — and it’s not clear what that means here — Jesse Gilbert and Nikhil Rasiwasia, yokes together the notions of surveillance and entertainment. Not a strange pairing in the era of “Big Brother.”

For “SVEN,” the artists installed a camera on the bottommost floor of the museum, and placed three video monitors, on which visitors can surreptitiously watch the activity, one floor up. Profiling software then picks out those individuals on camera who have “rock star potential,” isolates them, and, on one of the upstairs screens, plays a rock video. A janitor who happens to be holding his mop handle like a microphone stand might trigger Nirvana’s “Nevermind” or a U2 video. But, unfortunately, we never learn exactly what characteristics the software is targeting and by what sort of algorithm.

In addition to poking fun at profiling classification systems — “rock star potential” is only a lighthearted substitute for “terrorist potential” — the piece comments on the ways we simultaneously fear and are attracted to surveillance. Ever since the television show “Candid Camera” first aired in 1948 (George Orwell’s 1984 was published the next year), we’ve used surveillance for the purpose of amusement. Yet when it’s entertainment — be it “Big Brother,” or films such as “Rear Window” or “The Conversation” — surveillance is just a stand-in for the titillations of voyeurism.

What makes our modern profiling systems scary, and not in any way titillating, is that we have no idea who is watching us, why they are watching, and how — as well as how accurately — they are classifying us. To my mind, neither “SVEN” nor “Taken” sufficiently explores these fertile differences between voyeurism and institutional surveillance.

“Profiling” should be applauded for examining the humorous ways we look at each other. But the two pieces in it are most cutting, most acute in their commentaries, when they examine how readily we pass off responsibility — to the government, to security companies, etc. — for looking at ourselves.

Until September 9 (945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, 212-570-3676).