{"id":23943,"date":"2019-07-17T11:48:09","date_gmt":"2019-07-17T15:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=23943"},"modified":"2019-07-17T13:33:51","modified_gmt":"2019-07-17T17:33:51","slug":"2019-a-face-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2019\/07\/17\/2019-a-face-odyssey\/","title":{"rendered":"2019: A Face Odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cDo you ever part it to the other side,\u201d my girlfriend B asked one morning while I was futzing with my hair in the bathroom mirror. \u201cI read somewhere that it\u2019s good to part it the other way every six months so your regular part doesn\u2019t pull wider.\u201d Though it sounded like reasonable advice, the comment sparked an uneasy reflection \u2013 that the face I see in the mirror and in selfies is exactly reversed for everyone else\u2026<\/p>\n

A similar creeping feeling seems at play in people\u2019s reactions to the Snapchat \u201cgender swap\u201d filters. \u201cWhen the filter was released,\u201d Magdalene Taylor recalls in MEL Magazine<\/em><\/a>, \u201cmy social feeds were clogged with dudes talking about how hot they were with long hair and a feminized face. One dude even told Reddit about how he got caught jacking off to his.\u201d Curious what might be behind these users\u2019 apparent autoeroticism, Taylor asked psychologist Pamela Rutledge. \u201cIt appears that the gender-swap filter makes features more symmetrical, smoothes out imperfections,\u201d Rutledge said. Taylor observes they make your eyes look subtly bigger, too. \u201cSo the filter isn\u2019t necessarily an exact portrayal of a differently gendered self,\u201d Taylor says, \u201cIt\u2019s an idealized version of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The gender-swap filters feel uncanny, but not in the usually uncanny valley sense. In contrast to a lifelike robot or CGI character that looks a little off<\/em>, the eeriness of these face filters is more akin to meeting your doppelganger or a long-lost fraternal twin. On Facebook my cousin L posted a selfie with the \u2018guy\u2019 filter on and most comments from her friends suggested they didn\u2019t realize she was using it.<\/p>\n

This effect stems from these filters\u2019 subtlety I think. The novelty of overt augmentation, like the dog filter or the many sponsored filters that turn your face into food items, seems to have peaked a couple of years ago, as the viral popularity of 2017\u2019s FaceApp suggests. Using server-based neural nets, FaceApp made applying otherwise complex visual alterations, like \u2018gender swapping\u2019 or giving a formerly straight-faced selfie a grin, trivially easy. The app\u2019s surprisingly naturalistic, near instantaneous results gave previously static faces a newly interactive quality, as Linda Besner examines in this essay<\/a>. In it she recalls a designer\u2019s visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, during which he used the app on original Rembrant portraits, \u201cto brighten up a lot of somber looks,\u201d in his words.<\/p>\n

This participatory impulse Besner links to the history of Western art, specifically the transition from 17th century portraiture\u2019s realism and 18th century Enlightenment\u2019s determinacy to the 20th century when \u201cinteractivity between the viewer and the artwork became a dominant mode of creation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 1920s, Marcel Duchamp\u2019s Rotary Glass Plates<\/em> consisted of five plates affixed to an axis, and required the viewer to turn a handle to rotate them at speed. The whirling glass produced an optical effect as the afterimage on the viewer\u2019s retina glued the separate pieces into a continuous circle. In Allan Kaprow\u2019s 1964 event Eat<\/em>, apples dangled from strings in a cave-like space, and visitors could choose to consume them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FaceApp offers users a similar interactive thrill, whether from remixing historic portraits or their own previously frozen selfies.<\/p>\n

Like how a remix or cover song anchors itself in listeners\u2019 memories of the original, face filters usually ground their transformations by retaining some facial reference points (eyes, nose, jawline, etc). The gender swap filters in Snapchat push this resemblance deeper, almost subcutaneous, approaching special-effects makeup territory. And with some makeup artists appropriating sci-fi aesthetics in their everyday work, \u201cspecial effects\u201d may be a redundant descriptor.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it\u2019s fitting that the same year FaceApp blew up coincides with the popular debut of Hungry, the makeup artist behind Bjork\u2019s extraordinary look on her 2017 album, Utopia<\/em>. \u201cFor the [album] cover, Hungry \u2018painted and pearled\u2019 the iconic singer,\u201d Jade Gomez notes in this report<\/a>\u00a0(H\/t Jay Owens<\/a>), \u201cand got an \u2018orchid silicone appliance\u2019 made by her personal mask maker, James Merry. \u2026 The image has a sense of eerily detached femininity \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Bjork<\/a><\/p>\n

Hungry\u2019s Instagram<\/a> bio, Gomez points out, includes an apt phrase for her otherworldly style: \u201cdistorted drag.\u201d It\u2019s basically impossible to distinguish her clients\u2019 skin from the makeup elements, a seamless blending that good face filters approximate digitally.<\/p>\n

Between Hungry\u2019s posthuman constructions and the more normatively human gender-swap filters of Snapchat, a number of independent filter designers are making their own distinct contributions. Ashley Carman highlights a few up and coming creators in this report<\/a>. Their filters, many available on Instagram, range from bizarre \u2013 \u201ca halo of golden hotdogs\u201d \u2013 to what Carman calls \u201ccyborg-esque.\u201d The filters of Johanna Jaskowska<\/a> exemplify this latter type, creating shimmery, liquid, vellum-like appearances.<\/p>\n

\"Designer<\/a><\/p>\n

In an interview<\/a> with Vogue Italy, Jaskowska (from what I could get from Google Translate) relates face filters to fashion accessories: \u201cA dress influences the behavior of the wearer. \u2026 [In the] same way, your attitude is different if you put on a puppy dog filter or one that makes you look shiny.\u201d As well as taking cues from sci-fi movies, Jaskowska also draws inspiration from the dazzling effects on display in thriller director Henri-Georges Clouzot\u2019s L\u2019Enfer <\/em>(1964).<\/p>\n

\"Gif<\/a><\/p>\n

Another designer, Aoe (@aoepng<\/a>), prefers a public Q&A approach, developing multiple filters at once and posting their drafts to Twitter to gauge interest and collect feedback. A simple lipstick switcher<\/a>, a hand-drawn aquarium with flitting fish<\/a>, a second and third pair of eyes<\/a>. \u201cRather than making things that I want to make, I try to make the next piece by referring to the ones I’ve submitted previously,\u201d Aoe says<\/a> (thanks, again, Google Translate). Just trying their filters on one after another gives me a basic impression of a designer\u2019s creative inclinations, their learnings building on each other in a generative cycle.<\/p>\n

\"Designer<\/a><\/p>\n

Filters convey their designers\u2019 artistic process and development. Yet as interesting as the artistry may be, these \u201cinformational qualities [of social images],\u201d as Nathan Jurgenson argues in The Social Photo<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> \u201care a means to the end of expression.\u201d As Aoe attests, they \u201cpromote communication without words,\u201d and not only among users but between user and designer. \u201cThere was an overseas woman who gave the impression \u2018Your work is interesting!\u2019 She speaks English, I speak Japanese. There should be a language barrier there\u2026\u201d The visual, networked, filter-infused messages, in other words, helped to narrow the cross-cultural gap. This follows a key point in Jurgenson\u2019s book: \u201cSocial photos take in the world in order to speak with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as makeup, haircoloring or a different haircut can act as social lubricants that let us relate to others and ourselves in new, experimental ways, face filters can offer a temporary respite from more explicit and determinate forms of sociality, freeing us to interact more imaginatively and playfully with others and ourselves. And if their popularity continues to grow, it\u2019s easy to picture future iterations of the technology giving users deeper input into the design process, with direct control to customize not one face but any number of appearances for a variety of social contexts and moods.<\/p>\n

Though filters likely wouldn\u2019t exist at all without the history and present influence of makeup and fashion, their use as a mediating tool for conjuring different kinds of selves also owes a lot to the avatar builder feature of contemporary videogames. Instead of explaining that, I\u2019ll leave you with the following passage Vicky Osterweil wrote in her column Well Played<\/em><\/a> which directly inspired me to write this post.<\/p>\n

Video games involve the reiteration not only of stereotypes but also sorts of intimacy that can also be peculiar, counterhegemonic, and gender-bending. Many games \u2014 even ones like Saint\u2019s Row or XCOM2, which appeal in other ways to masculinist colonialist ideas \u2014 feature whole-cloth avatar construction, with players sometimes able to literally sculpt the bones and contours of their character\u2019s face and skeleton, allowing them to imagine and inhabit radically different bodies. Of course, these systems can work to reproduce and strengthen racist, misogynist, and transphobic tropes, restricting what kinds of hair styles, skin tones, facial hair, and so on are available and on what kinds of bodies. And they also may reproduce body-fascist standards of beauty, gender, and strength. But players\u2019 ability to use these systems for their own pleasures, desires, and identities \u2014 along with the fan-fiction, modding, and original full-motion-video content that proliferate around games \u2014 opens up spaces of creativity, encounter, and expression that challenge or attempt to overturn these stereotypes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nathan is on Twitter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Header image: left, Hungry’s Instagram<\/a> (Blessed filter by per666y<\/a>); right, Petit Anne<\/a> (filter by Aoe<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cDo you ever part it to the other side,\u201d my girlfriend B asked one morning while I was futzing with my hair in the bathroom mirror. \u201cI read somewhere that it\u2019s good to part it the other way every six months so your regular part doesn\u2019t pull wider.\u201d Though it sounded like reasonable advice, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2038,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2038"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23943"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23973,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23943\/revisions\/23973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}