Events

The face has had a privileged status in visual media, enrapturing cinematic audiences with its beauty and intensity of emotion. Yet, the study of the face and its social relevance is also the subject of pseudo-sciences like physiognomy and eugenics. This talk examines how the media help to capture the intimate details inscribed within the face, in what I will argue is, an artificial discourse of authenticity, identity, and intimacy by looking at how have media affected the way we perform such functions like self-identification and socialization. I attempt to trace how new technological developments in face recognition and artificial intelligence affect the way we inhabit our own faces, and how have media made it possible for us to inhabit the face of another (as with the deepfake or data analytics).

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is a professor of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA. She is the author of Unmaking Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Mythopoetic Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2017), and Digital Uncanny (Oxford University Press, 2019). She is currently working on a co-authored book with Martine Beugnet, The Trouble with Ghosts: Film Television and Other Spectral Media (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).