FaceValue

The (human) face’s value in a time of rapidly mutating standards and techno norms.

MA design thesis (2013), Sandberg Institute Amsterdam.

Recession, depression, faceless enemies, aerial views, cutbacks, bailouts, dead bulls, and raging bears: FaceValue is not traded on the stock market—yet.

FaceValue is what you and I are left with when CCTV is hooked to the Facebook databank and parents look younger than their children. FaceValue is what has a Britney look-alike earn more than Spears herself. FaceValue is what you consider when contemplating the appropriate nose for the day and while placing a new “chinplant” order at RapidAesthet3d. FaceValue is what stares back at you and me, relentlessly reflected in the surrounding screens fading to black.

FaceValue will remain after the Internet blacks out, putting monikers and avatars to sleep. Grainy purple PhotoBooth portraits of girls.jpg #ThickEuroCamgirl #ShavedCreampie endlessly re-posted, the breadcrumbs leading to their intimate Tumblr origin long trailed off, before/after anti-aging cream miracle comparisons with two different faces as proof, pop-ups and banners twitching and smiling in RGB hues, the replica’s copy’s multiples, same faces different names same names different faces, fictionally multiplying the world population—all are asleep. Imagine how quiet it will be.

"Bad breath is better than none." @TheTweetOfGod 1

And sometime before this I was trying to make a purchase choice: face.xxx, face.gov, face.biz, or plain and simple face.info? There were no bundle offers available.

Face.com, a facial recognition technology company, was sold to Facebook in June 2012. 2 Post-acquisition their technology was incorporated into Facebook’s tagging algorithm and their products discontinued. Their product, the mobile phone app Klik, allowed you to identify faces on-the-go. All you had to do was hold your mobile device in front of the suspect, take a photo, and the app would comb through the Facebook database for a match. A face needed to exist in both worlds, on- and offline, in order to be recognized. Klik promised facial recognition in the palm of your hands, like John Travolta/Nicolas Cage’s character’s identifying palm-over-face gesture in 1997’s Face/Off. As identification shifts from the face to a gesture, proximity is certainty.

Interface

A face is a dual-functioning shield and signifier. The face-as-surface presents a naked canvas with an adjustable transparency layer. As the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas put it, "The skin of the face is that which stays the most naked, most destitute…there is an essential poverty in the face; the proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance." 3 The face as communicator and identifier will always read as face and be read as intrinsically human: naked or overdressed, in shreds or huddled in cloth.

A face is to the body what an interface is to the screen. As such, a face can be personalized, designed, adjusted, adapted. A face is a status indicator, a steady news feed without the ability to scroll back in time. Instead, time piles up in layers, becoming visible through duration. Antonio Banderas recently declined an interface update: “I have eye bags and some people have proposed to me to take them out but I said no.” 4 The face is reality in constant animation: YourNameHere_Face.gif.

Mining FaceValue

The reproduction of faces can be found as far back as ancient Egypt, when portraiture immortalized rulers and gods through highly stylized depictions. Likeness to physicality was not of great concern; portraits were reserved for the rich and powerful, and having one was a statement in itself. In the fourteenth century, the development of oil paints and canvas in Northern Europe allowed for greater detail in portraiture. In the Netherlands, Jan van Eyck painted ultra-detailed heads and faces, but it wasn’t until Robert Cornelius’s first daguerreotype photograph in 1839 that facial reproduction became widely available. Photography, which relied on chemicals rather than a skilled hand, gained popularity during the 1900s. Photographs froze and captured a face as it really was, while paintings had to be made over the course of multiple sittings and could only ever be mimetic.

On January 11, 2013, the portrait painting of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Shortly after, an array of critiques and Internet memes ensued. Robin Simon, the editor of British Art Journal, called it “a rotten portrait.” 5 Artist Paul Emsley defended his work by declaring it unphotogenic. 6 It seems that Princess Diana was better off with Mario Testino’s portrait photographs.

Photography and networked optics are becoming ubiquitous as capture devices shrink in size and image storage moves to the cloud. On June 11, 1997, the innovator Philippe Kahn, credited with the creation of the first instant camera phone picture sharing solution for public networks, shared from his wife’s hospital bed the birth of his daughter with 2,000 family members, friends, and associates. This was the first wirelessly shared photograph via a cell phone. 7 In 2010, Motorola sold one billion cell phones equipped with cameras—more cameras than camera makers sold. 8

With the advent of photographic reproduction, the face moved from the corporeal to the flat, and ultimately to a display space. Robert Cornelius was suddenly able to hold his face in his hands and have it look back at him. 9 Unlike the flat, ephemeral reflection of a mirror, a photograph preserves arrested time. Pass it on. Make a copy. The endless flood of facial images that ensued from the advent of digital photography transformed over time into a stream of simulacra, drifting into anonymity and shifting from a portrait of a face to a mere image of some face. “This endlessly reproduced image is no longer a piece of information but a suggestion…something else than showing reality”. 10

Advancements in imaging technology have led to an rapid influx of faces—not that there suddenly are more new faces, but rather more of the same ones. The anonymity of the face allows for tag categorization: #hugelips #cute #nerd #glassesrhot . Categorization makes faces searchable and has turned micro-blogging site Tumblr—used primarily as personal mood boards of scrambled pixels and/or PhotoBooth snapshots with or without boyfriend/cat/clothes—into a vast involuntary stock photography vault, material readily accessible for identity theft. The most prominent feature and content generator of Tumblr is “re-blogging,” a re-posting option available for every image on Tumblr that allows images that were once created for a limited public to be swept away into virtual oblivion. Tags make the face vulnerable to bots and re-blog fanaticism. Tumblr outfits each uploaded .img with an .img ID and custom URL, making any .img possible to trace.

Thanks to re-blogging, almost no face is lost. Only the trace leading to its source disappears. The face turns into an anonymous orphan, swept far away from the home shores, taking on multiple lives of its own. Suddenly the orphaned face of a middle-aged woman resurfaces as Carole Gayle, a medical journalist on ezinearticles.com and Nancy King, a housewife in Indiana reviewing How to Cook Better in Ten Steps on amazon.com . Nancy and Carole have different names signifying different identities, however they share the same profile photo.

I first encountered “Laura” in a fake pop-up friend request ad for Facebook. A Google image search of her profile picture led me to the websites of breast enlargement specialist Annabelle Larkins and of teacher Adriana Boteanu, who included a PDF of her certificate from a college in Romania, as well as to the Facebook profile of Sabrina Faratti. After multiple failed contact attempts with the school listed as her employer in Romania, the only contact available among all the websites that featured the same profile photo, Laura’s real identity and the source of the image remained unclear. The multiple online personalities of different names but same faces all seemed somewhat believable.

Flexible Power Product

The development of coins in Greece marks the inception of the face as a flexible power product. Traditionally, heads of deities were engraved on coins. Alexander the Great was the first living person to have his face on coins. His expanding empire demanded the flexible, fast-paced circulation of a power product to mark his position in the vast and remote territories of the conquered land. Regardless of the accuracy of Alexander’s portrait, engraved on a coin it lifted him into the sphere of the gods. His face, engraved on a coin in constant circulation, rendered a powerful flexible product.

College football player Manti Te’o’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, supposedly died in September 2012. 11 After news of her “death” circulated, a girl surfaced claiming to be the person whose face the media identified as Lennay Kekua’s. It turned out that Kekua and Te’o had never met in person, but rather as @MTeo_5 and @lovalovaloveYOU on Twitter in 2011. They kept in daily contact via cell phone and online chatting, yet the face and the person Te’o fell in love with did not match. Her photos were from another girl’s Facebook account, a real person, but not the one Te’o had been talking to for two years. The custom of “catfishing,” 12 stealing someone’s identity to meet people online, seems to make no sense to the uninvolved. Won’t suspicion ensue after a long enough period of written exchange, apparent great chemistry, but denial to meet IRL [in real life]? How is so much trust given to a handful of photos and a name found on a social media profile? Involuntary stock photography provides a source of authentic personality profiles, taking advantage of the face’s power and our trust in physicality.

The face possesses power as an intrinsically human trait that suggests a physical body somewhere. Carole Gayle and Nancy King have a face, or at least a facial online representation. The face is real, yet detached from the corporeal body. The orphaned face takes on a life of its own as a flexible power product in constant virtual circulation. Pop-up ads that entreat you to become friends, Linkedin emails suggesting connections, Facebook relationships built on a profile picture and a bunch of “photo albums”—the face can be in all these spaces while signifying a “real human” behind the virtual face.

TheChive.com, a self-described photo entertainment website, hosts a forum dedicated to “find her” requests. The site is filled with faces of teenage girls assembled by lonely guys. The images have desperate, scribbled messages of “Find her,” “Oh My God!! Please find this Angel!,” “MOAR!!.” (Chive-speak for “more”) These wanted notices are posted with the hope of retracing the face’s source from the display space to IRL.

Techno Norms, or the Deliberate Production of FaceValue in Display Space

Technology creates techno norms, standards of human behavior and appearance defined by technology, as a result of perpetual innovation and extension of possibilities. In the display space, consisting of screens, devices, and gadgets where we encounter faces, techno norms evoke new standards of appearance. The display space provides involuntary encounters of faces in pop-up ads and phishing emails as well as voluntary encounters through telecommunication and social media. Faces live as flexible traveling merchants in the display space and must adapt design strategies to the mutating standards of display spaces.

Among the most effective transmitters of faces have been TV and cinema. With the development of broadcast TV, distances decreased and audiences increased. Suddenly thousands of people would stare at the same face simultaneously from thousands of different places.

Technological advancements in TV required a new functionality of makeup. Make-up which looked good in person appeared terrible on black-and-white television. In 1946 Max Factor Jr. introduced the first make-up for black and white commercial television. 13 “Green lipstick and rouge replace the customary red in make-up designed for actresses appearing in television broadcasts. The television camera, it is explained, does not record the red coloring in the human complexion, leaving the transmitted image flat and unnatural. When green is substituted, however, the lips and cheeks of a performer appear in accurate relation of tones with other facial features as the image is projected on the screen of the receiver.” 14 In the mid 60’s colour broadcast started on prime-time TV. 15 Once again, Make-up needed to adapt to new technology. Standards evolved as did the image quality. Standard definition resolution (SDTV) introduced what was called “pan-cake make-up,” 16 a thick layer of heavy cream foundation that evened out any wrinkles and blemishes, creating a smooth appearance. The on-screen smoothening functionality of the product, was unmasked off-screen. Disguised by relative low image quality, the thick make-up technique rendered faces into shiny wax cast lookalikes. Nevertheless, on-screen make-up changed women’s physical appearance IRL.

“Pancake” foundation, trademarked by Max Factor in 1937, gained popularity among actresses, as it had a lighter formula than previous, oil-based products. A 1948 advertisement promised “Pan-Cake Make-Up for that smooth, young look […] Marilyn Maxwell in Metro-Goldwyn Mayer’s Summer Holiday.” 17

America’s first nationwide broadcast in digital high definition was John Glenn’s lift-off in the space shuttle Discovery in 1998. It took another dozen years for HDTV to go mainstream. High definition generated 10x more resolution and less makeup. It revealed the layers of pancake makeup, ushering out the plastic look of the past and introducing a “less is more” aesthetic. Makeup has adapted to the harsh image of HDTV. Make Up Forever advertises its line of products “HD: High Definition Complexion” 18 as “both invisible on HD cameras and to the naked eye,” offering a “soft focus” effect for the face. Christian Dior Capture Totale High Definition Powder “transforms the reflection of the on-surface light to recreate a high definition brightness.” 19

Techno norms, and the resulting face, only read and function in the context of their development. Once removed, they are stripped of their function. Rendered useless, they read as avant-garde interpretations of a distant future, a comical gesture born out of too much imagination rather than a new aesthetic, mutating standards over time.

In 2009, photos taken of Nicole Kidman during the premiere for the movie Nine showed the actress with a strange white powder covering her nose and under her eyes, making her look more like Tony Montana in coke heaven than an elegant beauty. 20 The mishap prompted a media frenzy. It turned out that Kidman was the victim of an HD makeup application gone wrong. HD makeup reflects light differently than regular makeup, making it possible to apply less product while still retaining a concealing function for HD film production. The application of an enhancing product outside of its context led to a malfunction and resulting transparency of FaceValue strategy. Kidman’s face turned into a meme.

The makeup methods for the production of faces in display space are only temporary. Makeup can be washed off. Kidman’s mishap is (hopefully) a one-time situation, even though her Tony Montana face floats orphaned in viral oblivion. It has become a second face, alive only in the display space, different from the face encountered in reality. But what if we start adapting our faces to the display space permanently?

FaceTime Facelift, “a medical procedure developed to improve the way you look while video chatting,” was created by Dr. Robert Sigal in 2012. 21 It is named after Apple’s FaceTime video chatting feature for the iPhone. Dr. Sigal developed the procedure after receiving multiple complaints from clients who found their faces reduced in value by the new video-chatting technology and the angles at which web cameras capture their faces. FaceTime, PhotoBooth, Skype, and similar telecommunication technologies have introduced the immediate confrontation with one’s own face in a from-down-below perspective. These technologies add a narcissistic layer to face-to-face communication, by displaying a small image of one’s own face in the corner of the communication window. Apple promises “phone calls like you’ve never seen before”; 22 the cell phone is transformed into a pocket mirror on steroids.

Unlike makeup, FaceTime Facelift is a permanent procedure. As it was developed specifically for the display space, how will it perform offline, removed from its webcam environment? The face enhanced through FaceTime Facelift might become the new standard. As the gadgets and context for techno norms become more affordable and mainstream, will the demand for further permanent facial enhancement rise and alter the physical appearance of faces? Virilio’s forecast of a “prosthetic man” envisions a human body enhanced by technology, a face altered by added function: “Technology is colonizing the human body just as it colonized the body of the Earth.” 23

Homogenous Value

The spaces our faces live in change at the rapid pace of technological advancements. Permanent plastic alteration as well as temporary design of the face will keep evolving. 4K (ultra HD), an extremely high resolution image, displays more than the human eye can see. Even the most beautiful, smooth skin looks like a dry desert landscape. As the real is captured in a resolution too high for the human eye to discern, special makeup is needed once again to render the new image digestible. In time, Max Factor will be advertising “4K make-up, for that ultra-realistic look,” a cream that, once applied dries up, creating a crackly surface, mimicking the hyper-realistic resolution displayed on screen for our eyes to see IRL.

“The security guard wouldn’t let me in my moms gates bc he said I didn't look like Kim Kardashian…hmmm” #rude #getglasses @KimKardashian 24

Soon, we may be changing our faces like outfits. Perhaps instead of undergoing FaceTime Facelift, you will 3D print a custom chin implant on demand at Shapeways.com or purchase a temporary facial accessory down the street during your half-hour lunch break before that important Skype meeting. Temporary alteration is key to versatility. In FaceValue, we may steal our own faces for the sake of liberation and flexibility. In FaceValue, versatility is power.

As we happily send off our physically enhanced faces into digital oblivion, will you encounter your face soon again, asking for a connection on Linkedin via email? Will these virtual orphaned faces, living in display-space, become more valuable than our physical faces?