Beschreibung:
Face' is a multimedia composition for voice, violin, piano, recorders, live electronics and video, based around the use of facial and emotion recognition software. Face plays with how we see ourselves and each other by changing the familiar surface of the face with other representations, alternative portraits in image and sound. Face is the result of a search for poetry and beauty that, as so often, hides behind a questionable development. The piece navigates between the problematic practice of anthropometry in the early 20th century to the current use of emotional face recognition software, an ever-present aspect of our lives where the reading of the face is completely automated - stripped of ambiguity and removed from human intuitive perception.00Artist Johannes Schwartz uses an array of images, such as photographs of anthropological ?life masks? from the early 20th century, masks held in colonial museums, images of face used in fashion magazines and advertising. These moving and eerie images are set alongside live images made of members of Electra, using a photographic scanner that captures the face of the musicians as a line scan over an extended period of time, and transforms it into an almost unrecognisable landscape. Some of these images and the text of Maria Barnas are presented in large format in the 12 page inlay for the vinyl release