Introduced by the technological industry and scientific experts, such proprietary closed source algorithms veil the majority of program functionality input from available data output, hiding how it works from immediate observation by artist and audience. Yet, most AFEA systems–a term little clarified and much confused with facial recognition or biometrics–are ‘black box’ frameworks. These contemporary artists make visible a digital habit of thought that objectivates the human face into a plastic grotesque of grimacing extremis, and the self inside out into the universal or utilitarian. With the algorithmic age of computable emotions, an increasing number of digital artists base the form of their Internet or sculptural installation on Automated Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA), and its functionality achieved via the photographic documentation in face databases. The essay is accompanied by photos and video stills from Performing Pictures’ film poem "Dreaming the Memories of Now "(2018), depicting their work with the fotoesculturas. At the intersection between the material aspects of a “traditional” vernacular art form and “new” media art, we identify a photographic aesthetic that shifts from seeing and perceiving to physical engagement, and discuss how the frame and its parergon augment the photographic gaze.
#Mia pixelhead double bubble trouble series
We compare these »traditional« photographic objects with “new” digital forms of video animation on screen and in the public space that characterize Performing Pictures' work, and explore how the fotoescultura inspired new incarnations of their series Men that Fall. The early fotoesculturas were an augmented form of portraiture, commissioned by family members who supplied photographs that artisans in Mexico City converted into framed sculptural portraits for display on family altars. This essay traces the resurrection of the fotoescultura, a three-dimensional photographic portrait popular in rural Mexico in the early 20th century, as interpreted in recent works by Performing Pictures, a contemporary Swedish artist duo. The opposition to death here, however, meant something more: it meant a ‘fighting back’ against catastrophic human-driven processes, such as that of wild life extinction or, more generally, of the relegation of animals to the vulnerable beings’ par excellence in our technologically advanced societies (Pick 2011). This impulse to live is what we recognize as a fundamentally animal instinct, an instinct to oppose death and preserve one’s own conatus. This disappearance, the complete annihilation of life in the manner that ‘life’ is understood in secular thought (life as matter rather than transcendental spirit), was implicitly contrasted by the elephant’s and lions’ life-affirming will, their bestial impulse to live. The picture documents death through the absence of bodily form and human flesh, through the disappearance of the materiality that composes life in the first place.
In the picture circulated online by the Service to illustrate the event, what appears as the evidence of the killing is one and only piece of cloth, presumably part of the poacher’s trousers (figure 1). According to the statement, no trace of the poacher’s body was found, not even the bones. In April 2019, the South African Police Service announced in their Twitter account that a suspected rhino poacher was fatally wounded by an elephant and then mauled by lions in a country’s natural park.
0 kommentar(er)
