Faceness
2016
Video series

The four videos of “Faceness” were created from 180 million images of ancient Egyptian sculptures. The computer is taught to scan through hours of video, identifying the ancient faces and combining thousands of them together, producing never-before-seen hybrids, new chimeras unrelated to the original images.

The faces morph endlessly, in a seamless flow. They transform from old to young, female to male, regal to humble, ancient to seemingly-modern. Each face from this ocean of “faceness” suggests some unique, distinct flavor of human truth.

Each of us locates our individuality in our face. To reduce a human face to a set of data, a chunk of information— a very simple task for a computer—is a denial of our individuality and complexity. However, “Faceness” uses the face-as-information as an opportunity for inquiry into the nature of the individual and the collective, into history, into self and non-self.