Instead of losing face, I found it!

So, funny story! Last Thursday evening after class, I was looking online for some photos of 'Lister', a graffiti artist who does a lot of work with faces and I found an image from somewhere in Brooklyn that was taken fairly recently. I was trying to figure out where it was but couldn't figure it out. I was going to scout out some areas over this coming weekend. 

Then amazingly, on Friday, I was going somewhere with my mom and she had to stop in Williamsburg. As were leaving and turning the corner, there was the face I was trying to locate! I found it totally by mistake. It was great!

The face I found:

Food Network: Anthropomorphism in Your Kitchen

The pictures I collected were all of food that were intentionally shaped into faces.

But what about when we attribute faces where there usually isn't one, especially on food?

(remember, I am on a "what would Freud say" kick here regarding cannabalism)

Food Network does a good compilation.

...about that cannibalism metaphor...

Eckman (and maybe Mead) and Darwin all brought up the idea of "cultural contamination." I will just flat out admit that I have a maybe irrational aversion to that concept. To say that something is contaminating or can be contaminated is to suggest the possibility of purity, and I think the idea of cultural purity is delusional and inappropriate especially for our time (which is to say I find Darwin more forgiveable than Ekman). Furthermore, "contamination" connotates an invasive and

potentially dangerous alterity.

I had a professor who used cannibalism as a metaphor of how we consume and intake the cultural other and how the eaten become part of us, thus obliterating the distinction between us and them. With that in mind I wonder what Freud would say about these faces.

(notice also that when it's "too close to home," food faces are not cute any more and actually kind of gross.)

(for some very gruesome "advanced readings" see

http://www.geekologie.com/2008/05/wtf_thats_gross_bread_head_bak.php

which features life-like body parts-- face, gut, limbs-- made of bread in a bakery in Thailand.

Or http://www.geekologie.com/2008/06/omgwtfnobbq_cannibal_banquets.php

for Japanese Cannibal feast that features a life-sized pinata women filled with red-sauce covered food.)

Neuroscientists taking the "middle path" in nature/nurture debate

This week's reading really brought my attention to the

1. heated debate with a very long history regarding

and 2. dialectical (dialogic?) relationship between

nature and nurture.

So I found this study interesting...not just in its findings, but in its position in the nature/nurture debate.

Face Processing: The Interplay of Nature and Nurutre

Abstract

A number of behavioral and neuroscientific studies suggest that face processing is qualitatively different from the processing of other visual stimuli. Why? Is face processing in some sense innate? What role does experience play in the development of face processing? The authors review recent evidence related to these questions. They begin by identifying some of the ways in which face processing is special. They then consider findings that demonstrate a crucial role for experience-independent genetic mechanisms in the development of face processing and its neural substrates. Finally, the authors review studies demonstrating the crucial role played by experience-dependent mechanisms. These findings support the hypothesis that there is a genetic predisposition for a special face processing mechanism, but that experience plays a crucial role in tuning this mechanism during development.

Facial Action Coding System #AU6 exercise.

After doing some exploration in Paul Ekman's website, I found a link to one of his books, the Facial Action Coding System which has all of the coding information for facial movements. The first two chapters of the book are available online! In the second chapter, Ekman goes over action unit 6 which is the cheek raiser and lid compressor. There is a listed step by step instruction on how to do this action with your facial muscles. I tried doing it and while it seems super easy - it is a bit difficult to control the facial muscles as so.
The directions I followed:

• Try winking, using your cheek in the wink. Note how your cheek lifts. Now do that cheek lift without the wink. 
• Try squinting your eyes as though to block out a bright sun, and although this motivation is likely to produce AUs 4 and 7 as well, you can refine these movements to exclude all but AU 6. 

The end result:

Street artist Vhils

This street artist, vhils, creates his work in Europe (at least that is where all of the pictures are coming from when I searched them). He scratches large scale portraits from walls. It is quite amazing!

Don't Lie to Me

I found this short video that is related to Paul Ekman's list of basic emotions:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHraznv4pHQ&feature=related


Also, I was thinking about what Jim Jarmusch said about Bill Murray,

how his face is really expressive and that he can make you laugh

just by moving an eyebrow or something like that;

so I was hoping to find an excerpt from Lost in Translation,

the scenes where they are shooting an ad and they're asking him

to make different faces. They are not the expressions Ekman is talking about

but it's a funny exercise in trying different expressions anyway.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything besides this:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAS92XPvIM


And I also remembered this documentary series

about the human face on BBC called...well, The Human Face.

It's Monty Python's John Cleese and Elizabeth Hurley

presenting a different subject each time,

and on this particular episode Paul Ekman was the special guest:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4ynmc6D3tM


I'm sorry this post is not very illustrated,

I'm still trying to figure out how it can be done :)


P.S. I changed the link for Paul Ekman's video,

I hope this one is not in Swahili.

Isn't the resemblance just uncanny?

According to Face Transformers, this is what I would look like if one of my parents is an ape. I am glad neither of them are.

The University of St. Andrew's face averager doesn't work as well as this one and I haven't been able to get the face detector to work.

But fun times aside I want to point out that the Face Transformer used two eyes and mouth (you have to manually mark them) as sort of the anchor points of a face. Indeed, :) <-- this little guy required just as little to form a recognizable face. But if we really see a nose-less man outside of the theater of Phantom of the Opera we would probably find it odd. Look up a picture of Valdemort if you are not convinced. So why is it that a nose is dispensable in recognizing a face?

But the nose aside, here are links to some other online "face transformers" and face manipulation apps:

The aforementioned University of St. Andrews's face transformer

Face of the Future which allows you to upload two pictures and predict "what will their baby look like."

Face Morpher which produces animations of smooth transition from one face to another

I want to point out that aside from the fact that it's kind of fun, it seems these face-changing apps strikes the audiences' fancy by playing on a few common assumptions:

1. Certain facial characteristics can be mapped onto race. Not ethnicity, race-- which is to say, related to genes, have a biological basis, etc.

2. facial characteristics are hereditary-- again, genes, biology, etc.

3. That underneath Asian's small eyes or African American's thick lips (if that sounds offensive, remember that these are the kind of maneuvers face transformers use) there is a universal faciality.

This is a bit of a paradox, isn't it? We are born all the same, all with a face that we are born into , but we are not quite the same, because there are biologically based differences between races.

Mole mapping

This was the map I found last week that I spoke to the class about!

from the source:

"RED colored words are positive

BLACK colored words are negative
feel free to add your own notes
this word "凶" shows up a lot in the mole map. it refers to a non-specific unlucky thing. according to the text to the left of the drawing of the girl, it could mean bad luck in your career, marital troubles, losing money, a sickly body, your friends are gonna bring you troubles (like they'll borrow money from you), etc..
i grokked this mole map from a mole buster's night market stall in taipei. the mole-buster's mobile number is on the lower right of the flyer. call him to arrange for a mole-removing session (in case your mole happens to mean something unlucky)."

Smize!

In class on Thursday we were discussing eyes and smiling. I remembered Tyra Banks always telling the contestants on "America's Next Top Model" to smile with their eyes. News to me, Tyra Banks actually has a term for it, called "smize". Please enjoy, haha!

Facelessness

Elkin talked about the face being horror, though I find that facelessness to be a recurrent theme in pop culture. Maybe facelessness is not entire accurate of a description-- after all, if we can see faces in door knobs then it is hard to imagine an actual absence of face. Perhaps "displaced" is a better way to describe these faces.

The X-files' mutant alien soldiers whose sole aim was to annihilate man kind was characterized by witnesses (in the series, of course) as "men with no face." At a closer look, or rather, when you have a screen shot to closely study this faceless man, you can see that his facial features are still somewhat discernible (admittedly the X-files was produced on fairly low budget at this point, so perhaps the intention was to fudge the face further) Though where we would expect the usual parts of a face that leads up to a unity are missing: eyes, nose, ears. I am wondering if the lack of sensory organs speaks more to the alien mutant's non-humanness.

Shutter, The Grudge, and The Ring each centers its plot around a vengeful ghost whose faces are either obliterated or covered. There might be something to be said about the Japanese roots of the The Grudge and The Ring and the ways in which an object (or aesthetic) of horror is culturally constructed. Nonetheless, these movies sold well in the US, too. The thing about these faces is that they are not non-existent, simply non-visible.

And in the realm of covered or obliterated faces popular portrayals of the grim reaper definitely features a lack of face. The grim reaper obviously still has a head, as suggested by his hoodie, so the face disappeared from where one would expect a face. The idea, I think, is that it's a skull rather than a flesh face underneath the cape, but skulls have faces, too. My emphasis is on the fact that his face is hidden. In fact, I think grim reapers characters are charactered in part by his hidden face.

South Park's Kenny who dies in every episode is dressed in an eerily similar manner as the grim reaper... and remember, he dies every episode.

But in Kenny's case, we know that he has a non-skull face because of his eyes. Okay, Kenny is not very scary, he might be a bit tangential to my point.

Considering these faces in light of Elkins and Siegel's argument that the face signifies to us a coherent spirit that is comprehensible, what really is the scary thing about these displaced faces? Are they scary because their lack of faces provides a constant reminder that underneath where the faces are supposed to be is not a unified mind within the realm of comprehension? That we can never know what an alien mutant, an angry Japanese ghost, or a grim reaper wants to do next?

Exercise in Memory and Faces

Inspired by James Elkins in his "What Is a Face?" chapter in The Object Stares Back, I did an exercise in memory. I first tried to write a description for a face I see a lot in my life, then I tried to draw it from memory. Now, naturally, I have a more cartoonish look to my illustrations, but it is really interesting how I described them, how I drew them and then what these faces look like in real life.

 

Graffiti and faces!

After the music video for "Sledgehammer", I immediately thought of graffiti and characters and how a lot of writers will focus on the face if they are making characters, myself included.

I took this picture around 2005, in Texas. Most of Pars streaks on trains are of characters and faces. It is amazing how much can be illustrated with a seemingly basic face and some drips. The next writer I thought about was Broke, who is from Texas. While I took some photos of his stuff while I lived there, I did not take the following photo which depicts his fun style. He has totally animated and made candy corn emotional. He also adds faces to a number of objects in and around Austin like trees and dumpsters, among other things.

(via)

Face Mapping for Acne

When I did a google image search of face mapping, this advertisement came up for dermalogica. What I found really interesting about the advertisement was the language used in it. "With Dermalogica's unique Face Mapping zone-by-zone skin analysis, you can discover the real reason behind your skin concerns." (emphasis, mine) Similar to the language used in describing the face as the window into the soul and discovering the true person, apparently the face can also give information concerning acne and other body ailments. It also reminded me of the face maps that came up a lot in the film Chinese Box.

Face of the 80's!

The first thing I did when I arrived home from the first class was look up this epic music video from the 80's that focuses primarily on a face! The great thing about the Peter Gabriel "Sledgehammer" video is that while just shifting his hair style, and some minor facial expressions, Peter Gabriel really transforms the mood and emotions that he is exerting. Even if the background was not changing as well, his facial expressions would still be in transit!