Devon Schiller

Our knowledge about the facial expression of emotion may well be entering an age of scientific revolution. Conceptual models for facial behavior and emotion phenomena appear to be undergoing a paradigm shift brought on at least in part by advances made in facial recognition technology and automated facial expression analysis. And the use of technological labor by corporate, government, and institutional agents for extracting data capital from both the static morphology of the face and dynamic movement of the emotions is accelerating. Through a brief survey, the author seeks to introduce what he terms biometric art, a form of new media art on the cutting-edge between this advanced science and technology about the human face. In the last ten years, an increasing number of media artists in countries across the globe have been creating such biometric artworks. And today, awards, exhibitions, and festivals are starting to be dedicated to this new art form. The author explores the making of this biometric art as a critical practice in which artists investigate the roles played by science and technology in society, experimenting, for example, with Basic Emotions Theory, emotion artificial intelligence, and the Facial Action Coding System. Taking a comprehensive view of art, science, and technology, the author surveys the history of design for biometric art that uses facial recognition and emotion recognition, the individuals who create such art and the institutions that support it, as well as how this biometric art is made and what it is about. By so doing, the author contributes to the history, practice, and theory for the facial expression of emotion, sketching an interdisciplinary area of inquiry for further and future research, with relevance to academicians and creatives alike who question how we think about what we feel.

After the many algorithmic, computational, and digital turns over the last five decades, the ways in which we experience and understand the face as something in and of the environment appear to be fundamentally shifting. Indeed, today more and more corporations, institutions, and governments are using automated facial recognition systems within smart environments for abstracting data capital from facial behavior. Through a post-digital perspective, the author explores a history of ideas about the face in relation to its environment across the artistic, scientific and technologic imaginaries, both constants from the past and changes of the present. This intellectual historiography compares three sources: English folklorist Julia Somerset’s 1939 article “The ‘Green Man’ in Church Architecture,” German neurologist Joachim Bodamer’s 1947 case history “The Face Blind,” and Japanese computer scientist Takeo Kanade’s 1973 doctoral project “Computer Recognition of Human Faces,” as well as their rhizomatic interrelations. By tracing the role of the environment in the study of the face, the author maps a genealogical landscape of ideas that roams across the absence and presence of color, human perception and mediated vision, inner and outer ways of seeing, as well as nonvisible and visible imaging. And, to possibly reconcile the very real ambiguity of the human face with the digital binarism of our increasingly computational planet, the author proposes a “greening of the face” whereby the face and its environment are conceptually modelled as being concretized within a complementary, reciprocal process of becoming.