"[for] the face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code * when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call Face." Deleuze and Guattari
Capgras delusion is understood as a breakdown in facial recognition. You see but do not recognize other people. You see a person and insist that they look like or even look identical to someone, but that they are in fact an imposter, a replacement, or a robot. The breakdown occurs most commonly with recognition of those closest and most intimate. You see a parent, spouse, child, sibling, lover, etc., but insist they are replaced by a robot or other synthetic being. Capgras can extend to the self as well: you look in the mirror or at a photograph of yourself and see someone who is identical to you but is not you. You see a robot imposter. In a variant known as Fregoli delusion, you insist that all other people are replaced by a single imposter. The multitudes you see, from intimates to strangers on the street, are in fact one person who moves around and changes appearance. These delusions are thought to result from brain lesions. You see but do not recognize. You do not recognize the "person in the face," according to Oliver Sacks, who compares the failed face recognition to computer optical scanning. There is capture of details, there is locating surfaces, there is even identification of pieces of the face (an eye, the nose, mouth, skin), but the pieces remain pieces. No more persons, nothing but defacements and dismembering. Perhaps Sacks' analogy to the computer is exactly right. Is this not how you see in the digital? You see the object on screen but you recognize it as pixilated and processed. The digital is exact, everything addressable, everything antialiased. The image is cool and clean, yet precisely its perfection references otherness. If you read the digital, it is because you read into the digital, into and towards otherness. Alan Sondheims work is a faceoff between the digital and the analog, a continuous wearing through to the practico-inert of the real. Sondheim deals with uncanny encounters between the perfection of digital and the messiness of the real. "Hi, are your breasts your ears?" These words begin Sondheims video havingfunhead.mov. The head is odd, disturbingly so. It is apparently made of digital images. The ears are indeed breasts, from an image of a naked woman, as are the eyes, and the limbs of the image, which twine around the chin and the back of the head. Other surfaces of the face are some sort of unreadable map, the details too blurred to be discernible. Throughout the video, a voice questions the head, and the head responds, turning, nodding, tilting, but never speaking. But in what way are they "your breasts" and "your ears"? At least this is what the voice asks, and the head's responses are far from clear. Is the voice speaking to the head or is it speaking to you? Does the head actually respond? Or do you respond, watching the movie, answering the voice by recognizing the breasts and the ears, recognizing the face of this odd mute head? What is clear is that response, whatever response occurs, is part of self-possession, part of being in this environment. Response places the head and the body parts, places the breast and the ears, places the voice and you, places all loci of address, as direction and intention of an image * of this video * and as the subject of a narrative of desire and possession played out on video. In short, as a problem of reading the spectacle. The head seems to nod but the nodding is a kind of twisting. It may not even form a nod of affirmation. What is a nod? Which is to say: what transactions occurs when you agree to my request? The voice asks: "do you want me to touch you?" and then: "I dont know what youre saying, do you mean yes?" The head is addressed, placed by the voice. The voice speaks to the head, naming your breasts and your ears. In fact, a mouse pointer follows the head's movements. If at first it seemed that the head moved and responded, it soon becomes clear that the mouse is directing the head. The head is responded, turned, nodded, tilted, and spoken for. In fact, the cursor and voice are multiplexed, working together. Voice and pointer are a single field of action across the visible space of the video. As you watch, the voice seems to come from where you sit, the pointer seems directed by your hand out of sight on the computer's mouse. The head responds to your desire. The voice touches the head. It seems to penetrate the thick, image-laden surface, extruding it from the background. The voice wraps the head. The voice multiplexed with the mouse pulls the surface. More than an image on the surface of digital video, the wrapping seems to extrude, to push into the space between the pixilated screen and where you view the video. The wrapping thickens and replaces the head. The wrapping becomes a medium absorbing your voice and gaze. "Does this make you happy? Do you want me to stop?" The head's wrapping looks like a bondage mask. It covers every part of the head. The way it holds tightly around every feature, containing any hair or teeth, references the restraint and containment of sadomasochism. The head is a gimp, the submissive partner in domination relationship. This relation is already established: you watch and control, the head responds. The bondage hood objectifies, removing features and turning the head into nothing but a shape, a toy! to be played with. The bondage hood silences, gags any sound. The head has ears only for you (and they are breasts). How do you understand the head's desire? Your desire guides the images, interlacing the voice and the image. The head's desire, the submissive desire of the gimp, is withdrawn and hidden in what the images wrap, hidden beneath the surface of the digital. There is a willingness that draws the voice into the head. At the same time, there is torture, a silent cry of a mouth gagged and covered. Where does this wrapping come from? Havingfunhead.mov is made using software such as Face Tracker, which takes a video data stream as input and processes it frame-by-frame to automatically locate and extract faces. Similar software is available on many digital cameras. You no longer need to carefully frame and focus on a person's face, the camera automatically does it for you. The software uses twenty or more different recognition points, based on an eigenface recognition algorithm, to output estimated human face locations. The head is wrapped with video feeds automatically formed into a face. The twenty or more standard locations of the face are the criteria for wrapping the head. The eigenface algorithm is an approach to face recognition based on possible human faces. An eigenface is the merging and normalization of a large number of actual facial images, into a single image composed of statistically common features of human faces, standard ingredients that we share to some degree: perhaps 30% of the ears of this eigenface, perhaps 10% of the nose, perhaps 70% of the chin, and so on. Looking at an eigenface, one sees a vague and hazy blur, apparently a human face but not recognizable as anyone in particular. The bland vagueness is disturbing. The eigenface lacks specificity. It is no ones face but is like everyones face. The eigenface drives out the singularity and otherness of individual faces, until all faces tend towards mess and blur. Using Face Tracker with software such as Geomagic Studio, which automatically generates three dimensional virtual objects from flat streams of data, digital artists meticulously craft avatars for video gaming and movies. From scanning body parts to the final knitting together of complete bodies, there are environments built around production cycles, transforming pieces and bits of the analog into the virtual body. An avatar head is built from individually designed ears, nose, mouth, eyes, and so on. In Geomagic Studio, the head is sewn together, its three-dimensional shape formed, every surface smoothed. All virtual heads are motley collections of pieces. All that appears in the digital is production value, artful assemblies of dismembered parts.
