Digital Skin
layers as seen by machines
The following student project speculating the future of fashion was an interesting reference for us.
It became a starting point for us to start thinking about the various physical lenses through which identity could be seen. How does the digital distort identity?
The physical form of tunnel books made us think of old accordian style cameras. We looked at Da Vinci’s Camera Obscura — a person hidden within a box- making images — collecting information from the world outside. So if this box were a machine — it’s only view of the world provided by a camera — how would it identify people?
With this in mind, we were introduced to Sir Francis Galton — a eugenist. And suddenly it flipped a switch in us.
Composite Portraiture/Photography was something he devised. It involved deriving the mean/average of faces by superimposing them — keeping the eyes aligned. He used composites to define an ideal type — be it criminals, jews and so on. Likes of which exist even today. For eg. facial recognition (AI) can now detect your sexuality, or so they claim. Ultimately what we are doing is programming biases into the system, making it both reductive and highly problematic.
We then revisited our box camera and asked a question. Would the box/machine still see the various ‘layers’ that make up a person — or would it rather look at each person as a layer? A layer towards compositing this average face- classifying, profiling and categorising us. Are we at the end of the day, in this digital world, just a layer?
This propelled us in a more defined path. We were going to deconstruct and reconstruct the face of the RCA by collecting our layers — the faces of the students.
With respect to creating an average face today there are several applications and softwares built to achieve this. You can even generate babies with a click of a button.
We would have liked to use an algorithm — perhaps even code it ourselves but our limited skills and timeframe made us skeptical. A three step procedure on Adobe Photoshop would do the trick. All we had to do was become computers for a day — and manually align all the faces we collect. Easy Peasy.
