Periodic Reporting for period 3 - FACETS (Face Aesthetics in Contemporary E-Technological Societies)
Période du rapport: 2022-06-01 au 2023-11-30
FACETS studies the meaning of the face in contemporary visual cultures. There are two complementary research foci: widespread practices of face exhibition in social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tinder; and minority practices of occultation, including the mask in anti-establishment political activism (e.g. Anonymous) and in anti-surveillance artistic provocation (e.g. Leonardo Selvaggio). Arguably, the meaning of the human face is currently changing on a global scale: through the invention and diffusion of new visual technologies (e.g. digital photography, visual filters, as well as software for automatic face recognition); through the creation and establishment of novel genres of face representation (e.g. the selfie); and through new approaches to face perception, reading, and memorization (e.g. the ‘scrolling’ of faces on Tinder). Cognitions, emotions, and actions that people attach to the interaction with one’s and others’ faces might soon be undergoing dramatic shifts. In FACETS, an interdisciplinary but focused approach combines visual history, semiotics, phenomenology, visual anthropology, but also face perception studies and collection, analysis, and social contextualization of big data, so as to study the cultural and technological causes of these changes and their effects in terms of alterations in self-perception and communicative interaction. In the tension between, on the one hand, political and economic agencies pressing for increasing disclosure, detection, and marketing of the human face (for reasons of security and control, for commercial or bureaucratic purposes) and, on the other hand, the counter-trends of face occultation, the visual syntax, the semantics, and the pragmatics of the human face are rapidly evolving. FACETS carries on an innovative, cross-disciplinary survey of this phenomenon.
FACETS started on June 1, 2019, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its main focus has been the face, in particular the evolution of its meaning in the digital era. The topic has become urgently crucial during the pandemic: faces have been covered with medical masks; face-to-face interactions have been severely limited by the danger of contagion; many previously offline human activities have turned digital, and so have the human faces involved. New devices, techniques, formats, genres, and styles of the face have developed. The pandemic, needless to say, has constituted a major obstacle for FACETS. Several activities planned for 2020 had to be canceled. However, it has represented an opportunity too: to satisfy the new urgent social demand of knowledge on the consequences of the masked, digital face; to reinvent research into online forms; to study the new meanings of the digital face during the pandemics. FACETS has therefore sought to stay faithful to the initial Description of the Action, while readapting research, its foci, and its methods to the new urgency.
Thus far, despite the difficulties generated by the pandemic, FACETS has produced a number of scholarly open access publications, academic events, dissemination products, and online materials, dealing with two extraordinary novelties in the panorama of the present-day cultures of the face. On the one hand, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly proficient at creating realistic images of biologically and ontologically non-existing faces; these visual simulacra are increasingly being used in several forms of digital interactions, sometimes in a misleading way (for instance, in order to create fake politically active accounts in social networks); also, the tecnology of the "deep fake" (the creation of realistic manipulated videos of faces) is progressing and turning into a potential threat in relation to the spreading of the 'visual fake'. FACETS is constantly monitoring these emerging phenomena and creating experiments and tools to assess the likeliness and persuasive force of forged faces. On the other hand, FACETS has had to deal with an unexpected new topic of investigation: both in personal and in digital interactions, faces all over the world have been more and more covered by medical masks and other protective facial devices, aiming at counter the spreading of the COVID-19 pandemic. FACETS researchers have produced a number of new insights about the impact of the wearning of such protective devices on human interaction and communication. A collective instant book has been published on the topic, as well as a number of articles and essays. Particular attention has been devoted to the ways in which the wearing of protective masks might hamper communication and the expression of emotions, especially in communicative interactions among deaf people. Experiments are being conducted in this domain, whereas contacts are being established with stakeholders in both society and industry for the potential redesigning of medical masks. FACETS is re-interpreting in relation to the pandemic also its original research line concerning the usage of facial images as expressive means of both individual and collective identities. On the one hand, research has been conducted on the shift from recreational individual selfies to pandemic collective selfies, especially in dramatic contexts such as emergenecy rooms in hospitals and long-term care establishments. On the other hand, an ERC Proof of Concept is being developed in order to provide staff-assisted residents in such establishments with new face-centered digital tools and platforms of communication with the external world, especially in order to provide alternative ways of interaction to elderly and other fragile people during the pandemic.