Kyriakides, Yannis
Face
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 is completely automated - stripped of ambiguity and removed from human intuitive perception.