This piece has been shown at:
06/16 – XXI Triennale International Exhibition, Call Over35 – Milano, IT (Currently Showing)
05/16 CHI2016 Art Exhibition – San Jose, CA
09/15 – “Except/0n” St. James Hatcham Building – London,UK
Press Selection:
Wired US – Wired JP – Prosthetic Knowledge – The Creators Project
This work explores the possibilities of empathy as a meta-language through the most powerful physical interface which is our face. The face is a part of ourselves which is not visible to us without the use of a mirror or an external tool (photography, video, etc.). Dedicated entirely to the “other”, it becomes our window to the world and the world’s window to ourselves.
I asked 8 people to share a personal episode of their lives which they could somehow reconnect to one of the 6 basic emotions (P.Ekman) anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise.
Everyone of them picked up a very diverse subject and I asked them to tell me that story in their original language. By doing this I am trying to disconnect the reason linked to the language, in favour of a more fluid emotional communication.
My challenge with this work is inducing in the viewer a sort of ‘identity displacement’, which reminds the phenomenon of the empathy. The more the viewer empathize with the actor the more the faces merge into a new identity which is no more the actor’s nor the viewer’s but something new.
This piece was part of the collective exhibition “Except/0n” held in September 2015 at St. James Hatcham Building In London.
I wrote the original software in C++, using Openframeworks. The Program uses, among the other features, the ofxFaceTracker addon by Kyle McDonald based on Jason Saragih’s FaceTracker library.
