The Face You Give Me

The Face You Give Me is an interactive installation for two people that only starts once both have taken their seats. One person looks at the other. Where their gaze falls, and how long it stays there, determines how the system categorises and judges the other person’s face. Four screens show live, step by step, how a new face is built from that gaze.

The piece makes visible something usually hidden: algorithms start with human decisions. It draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the face as a social sign, and on Claudio Celis Bueno’s argument that facial recognition doesn’t recognise faces so much as produce them, breaking a face into data and reassembling it as a category. The installation sets the machine’s process against the human gaze, which is just as far from neutral.