‘Face Time: The Semiotic Temporalities of Biometric Art’
In his doctoral research project, which is supported by a DOC Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Devon Schiller proposes that biometric art that uses emotion recognition is fundamentally poly-temporal. As a time-based and time-critical art praxis, biometric art tactically intervenes with the hegemonic temporalities for facial behavior that are established in the scientific and technological cultures of the face. Denaturalizing these codes and ideologies by making explicit the implicit conventions behind facial measuring as well as emotion modelling, biometric art provokes novel temporalities for the attention and embodiment of the human face in the lived present. In this dissertation, “face time” is understood to be constructed through the scientific as well as technological context, and its mediations, which culturally inscribe biological corporeality. Through applied critical visual semiotics from the American pragmatic semiotic tradition, this dissertation maps and models the multiplicity of temporalities of which biometric art is composed and with which it interacts.
Related Publications
“A Face of My Own: The Cultural Semiotics of Botox Treatment in Marsha Wichers’ Face Design.” In Semiotiken in den Kulturwissenschaften/Semiotics in Cultural Studies, edited by Nadja Gernalzick, Thomas Metten, Nora Benterbusch, and Filip Niemann. Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2023.
“On the Basis of Face: The Politics and Practices of Biometric Art.” In Frankenstein Reanimated: Art and Life in the 21stCentury, edited by Marc Garrett and Yiannis Colakides, pp. 55-72. London: Torque Editions, forthcoming 2022.
“The Face and the Machine: A Review of Ksenia Fedorova’s Tactics of Interfacing: Encoding Affect in Art and Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020).” Cybernetics and Human Knowing, vol. 28, no. 3-4, pp. 145-152.
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