Ambiguous Physiognomy
Details6
- No.
- 0081
- Date
- 1 May 2017
- Type
- Performance
- Place
- University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Humanities (KUA), Copenhagen (DK)
- Resembles
- 0001 Data Kroppe
- Read as
- RED 20%, MID, EVEN, BUSY
Ambiguous Physiognomy, a live facial-tracking lecture, first given at the University of Copenhagen's Faculty of Humanities in May 2017, and again at Aarhus University's Aesthetics and Culture seminar "Craft: Mastery and Amateurship in Contemporary Art(s)" on 27 October 2017. A written version was later published as a paper.
The lecture was announced as a talk about Recognised Faces, the internet project that has generated a new face every day since 2015 for the artist to use as his portrait. It sets out from that and drifts, which is the method. The sticker comes off the laptop's webcam and the speaker's own face appears on the projection above him, tracked live by the same kind of software. From there: the strangeness of one's own face studied up close; another Kristoffer Ørum, a truck driver in Hårlev born in the same month of the same year, known only from search results and a photograph of his truck; a childhood belief in being a changeling descended from Russian royalty, and a grandmother who was in fact a refugee from the civil war; and the question of whether a nose can be read as totalitarian or nationalistic, with Putin's face as the test case.
The subjects, in the mailout's own list: Russian heritage, Putin's totalitarian nose, the TV show Lie to Me, poisoned knowledge, triangulation and emotional datasets.
The lecture is part of the project that became Putin's Nose.
