UC San Diego

We live in a state of facial alienation. Images of our faces are stored in unknown numbers of corporate and governmental databases around the world and used to develop technologies that track, discriminate, identify, surveil and generate faces and people, without our knowledge or consent. This project uses the sculptural process of casting faces as a provocation to imagine other forms of facial belonging. I constructed an alternative database of faces using casts from my creative community. After being vacuum formed in plastic, these faces are tiled across the back of a panoramic curtain and performed as a shadow play titled, You took my impression without ever touching me. This paper includes the process, script and a manifesto that resulted from the project. The bot, the puppet and the shadow are three different kinds of accounts - three different uses of data that relate to an authentic person. The bot mimics a person, the puppet poses as a person, and the shadow extends from a person. In this script, a person speaks to these three different states of facial alienation, these three different impressions and instrumentalizations of themselves. These conversations reveal how we create our data bodies and our data bodies create us, how we alienate ourselves and are alienated by our own inventions.