HUMSS - Massimo Leone

A Cultural Semiotics of Facial Technologies

The conundrum of artificial faces is that there are no natural faces, yet there is no face that is not also natural. Scholarship must, for each case and category of facial items, outline the threshold between nature and culture, genetic transmission and language: photoreal portraits of non-existing biological faces generated by neural networks look as extremely realistic to the early 2020s viewer, but will they still do so twenty years from now? The answer depends on the history of facial communication, which includes the history of facial technology, that is, the series of devices and technics through which faces are ‘made’, from dentistry to make-up, from plastic surgery to digital filters.