Face Off begins with the circles used by early machine-vision systems to locate points on the human face. Eyes, mouth, nose and jaw are translated into coordinates. The face continues to exist in the world, but at the same time another version of it begins to occupy a different space.
The face is perhaps our most intimate human surface. We are wired to respond to it, reading minute differences in expression, attention and emotion often without conscious effort. Before we understand language, we respond to faces. They are among the primary surfaces through which we recognise others and through which we become recognisable ourselves.
And yet the face has proved remarkably detachable.
In John Woo's Face/Off (1997), the faces of two adversaries are surgically removed and exchanged. The absurdity of the premise exposes something fundamental: the face is simultaneously an intimate part of ourselves and a surface through which identity is assigned. Remove it, and the apparently secure relationship between appearance and person begins to collapse.
Facial landmark detection performs another kind of removal. The eye becomes a position. The edge of the mouth becomes a coordinate. Expression, character and presence are reconstructed as distances and geometries. Nothing is literally taken away, yet the face has acquired a second existence independent of the encounter in which it originally appeared.
Made in 2002, Face Off extracted the circles from this computational space, photocopied and radically enlarged them, and distributed them across a chipboard structure built around an architectural ramp. Marks that would normally occupy only a tiny part of an image became architectural forms. People moving from one part of the building to another passed through a space inhabited by the enlarged artifacts of their computational double.
Jordan Peele's later film Us (2019) offers another way of imagining this doubling. Beneath the familiar world exists another populated by doubles whose strange actions correspond to the lives being lived above. Behaviour retains its pattern while losing the circumstances that made it meaningful.
Increasingly, something similar occurs alongside everyday life. Our actions generate another version of the world in which behaviour is separated from the situations in which it occurred. Movement, attention, preference, expression and association can reappear as data: isolated, compared and assembled into patterns from which further behaviour might be predicted.
The face was an early and particularly intimate territory for this doubling. A smile, a glance, the tightening of a mouth — gestures embedded in an encounter between people — could cross into another space and reappear as changing relationships between points. Context falls away. Pattern remains.
In Face Off, this other space breaks back into the physical world. The circles escape the screen, escape the scale of the face, and become architecture. As people move along the ramp, their bodies pass among enormous marks belonging to a system attempting to make the human face calculable.
In 2002, this parallel world could still announce itself through crude and visible signs: circles floating across a face.
Face Off
2002, photocopies, chipboard
Face Off begins with the circles used by early machine-vision systems to locate points on the human face. Eyes, mouth, nose and jaw are translated into coordinates. The face continues to exist in the world, but at the same time another version of it begins to occupy a different space.
The face is perhaps our most intimate human surface. We are wired to respond to it, reading minute differences in expression, attention and emotion often without conscious effort. Before we understand language, we respond to faces. They are among the primary surfaces through which we recognise others and through which we become recognisable ourselves.
And yet the face has proved remarkably detachable.
In John Woo's Face/Off (1997), the faces of two adversaries are surgically removed and exchanged. The absurdity of the premise exposes something fundamental: the face is simultaneously an intimate part of ourselves and a surface through which identity is assigned. Remove it, and the apparently secure relationship between appearance and person begins to collapse.
Facial landmark detection performs another kind of removal. The eye becomes a position. The edge of the mouth becomes a coordinate. Expression, character and presence are reconstructed as distances and geometries. Nothing is literally taken away, yet the face has acquired a second existence independent of the encounter in which it originally appeared.
Made in 2002, Face Off extracted the circles from this computational space, photocopied and radically enlarged them, and distributed them across a chipboard structure built around an architectural ramp. Marks that would normally occupy only a tiny part of an image became architectural forms. People moving from one part of the building to another passed through a space inhabited by the enlarged artifacts of their computational double.
Jordan Peele's later film Us (2019) offers another way of imagining this doubling. Beneath the familiar world exists another populated by doubles whose strange actions correspond to the lives being lived above. Behaviour retains its pattern while losing the circumstances that made it meaningful.
Increasingly, something similar occurs alongside everyday life. Our actions generate another version of the world in which behaviour is separated from the situations in which it occurred. Movement, attention, preference, expression and association can reappear as data: isolated, compared and assembled into patterns from which further behaviour might be predicted.
The face was an early and particularly intimate territory for this doubling. A smile, a glance, the tightening of a mouth — gestures embedded in an encounter between people — could cross into another space and reappear as changing relationships between points. Context falls away. Pattern remains.
In Face Off, this other space breaks back into the physical world. The circles escape the screen, escape the scale of the face, and become architecture. As people move along the ramp, their bodies pass among enormous marks belonging to a system attempting to make the human face calculable.
In 2002, this parallel world could still announce itself through crude and visible signs: circles floating across a face.
The circles have become harder to see.
The other world has become much larger.