A small, intimate ritual to reflect on big socio-technological changes,
for empathy in public spaces.
Tele-presence technologies extend our bodies beyond biological boundaries in time and space, but prevent us from touching..Â
Can I touch you online?
In the smart digital public domain, we are increasingly faced with the paradox of ‘the higher surveillance, the lower trust'. Saving Face is a response on increasingly trusting each other based on bio-metric control and surveillance technologies, connected to AI algorithms and social media. The artists deconstruct bio-metric control technologies to create and share a poetic 'meeting-through-touching' ritual and dialogue. Participants are invited to caress their own faces, to connect with others worldwide; to endlessly meet, caress, mirror and merge.Â
Smart City Meeting Ritual: 1. Come close 2. Caress your face 3. Merge and Mirror
In the public space, an interactive city sculpture interface includes a camera, algorithm, face-recognition technologies and generative database, connected to a large urban screen. People are invited in front of the camera to caress their faces. Through caressing, they ‘paint’ their portraits on the screen. The portraits appear as virtual persona's, slowly merging with the portraits of previous visitors and further merging through every face-caressing act of following participants, co-creating untraceable, fluid, networked identities. Each virtual persona is saved in a database, to be printed for a Saving Face Passport. When the installation is not used, portraits transform autoplay from the growing database, visible on the urban screen.
Artistic Strategy - Touching my face as a social interface
Traces of participants’ vulnerable, intimate gestures are real-time exposed on the urban screen, as unpredictable and unfamiliar portraits. In the public space, relations between participants’ vulnerable acts of caressing their faces and spectators are designed as an artistic strategy to enhance dialogue on social bonding and intimate connections. These hybrid encounters, in which physical experience and digital data converge, are hosted by the artists.
In dynamic, smart public spaces, the co-created virtual personas are exposed as 'a shared face' of a city square, or museum-hall’s visitors. When traveling to various geographical and cultural contexts, Saving Face playfully connects - both online and offline - different personal historical and cultural backgrounds. Participants in cities worldwide ‘Tele-Touch’ each other to meet. The portrait on screen is part of a shared, social process. Within the tradition of the composed and 'morfing' portrait, the artists orchestrate 'a social process to create a portrait'. This process connects the physical ‘realness’, that we feel when touching our faces, to the interaction with a virtual persona in the public domain. In a post-human process, for a social construct to emerge, this persona appears in the process of merging with others, as what can be called an 'alternative selfie'.
How do we experience our bodies and connections being measured and turned into fixated, controllable ‘profiles’? Bio-metric technologies interfere with our connections based on face-to-face connection and touch, from which identities may emerge as social constructs. Can touch, vital to our well-being, play again a role in connecting? Saving Face is designed to disrupt perception of ‘who sees and who is being seen, who touches and who is being touched’ among public participants. Participants are asked to ‘caress themselves and feel being touched’ to connect with others in a mixed reality, multi-sensory interface, for dialogue on new connections of empathy and trust.