WORKSHOP 3
Friday 8 April
Working Faces: Facial Expression and New Models of Likeness in
Portraiture
ABSTRACTS
JOHN ONIANS
Neuroarthistory and the face
Paintings of faces were recognized as constituting a separate artistic genre
long before it was realised that the brain has a separate Fusiform Face Area
dedicated to their perception. This and other discoveries about our neural
make-up allow us to review the history of art, exploring ways in which
neuroscience can help us to better understand both the production of, and the
response to facial imagery. Among the topica that are illuminated are
portraiture and caricature, emotional expression and lateralization.
Secondary phenomena on whose origins and development neuroscience
sheds light are the both explicit and implicit references to faces in the
decorative arts and especially in architecture, where the tendency to
anthropomorphisation is alluded to directly by the use of terms such as
‘facades’ and ‘capitals’. Neuroarthistorical studies of the face thus allow a
better appreciation of the reasons both for the universality of such trends and
for the way their impact varies at different periods and in different places
around the globe.
DR JEREMY TREE (Swansea)
Talking Heads – Can motion based information improve face processing
in prosopagnosia?
Face recognition is a task that we achieve so effortlessly that it is often taken
for granted, but this belies the fact that it is a complex process and when it
breaks down the consequences can be devastating. In a condition known as
prosopagnosia an individual is unable to recognise identity from faces,
including very familiar faces (i.e., family members and even their own!) and
research with such individuals has shed light on aspects of the face
processing system. However, one criticism of earlier work is that it has often
used static faces (typically photographs) and this underestimates the far richer
face based information we can utilize in real world situations – in particular,
motion. In the real world, faces move and individuals often have their own
facial motion ‘signature’ (i.e., an idiosyncratic face movement). Very recent
work suggests that idiosyncratic facial movements can provide important cues
to facial identity in normal participants (Roark et al. ,2003) – indicating that
motion can assist in face recognition. Preliminary findings also suggest that
the same benefit of motion can be seen in cases of prosopagnosia (Steede et
al., 2007). The following presentation discusses the role of motion in face
recognition, and summarises the most recent findings with respect to
prosopagnosia, and briefly considers these findings with reference to current
models of face processing.
RUTH LEYS
"'Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula,' or, How is Emotional Empathy
Supposed to Work?"
The discovery of mirror neurons in macaque monkeys by Giacomo Rizzolatti
and others appears to fulfil a long-standing ambition in the human sciences to
understand aspects of human and animal behaviour as forms of motor
mimicry according to which the subject automatically echoes, or empathizes
with, the behaviour of others because of a shared mirror neuron mechanism.
In my presentation, I will discuss attempts to extend the mirror neuron
hypothesis to emotional behaviour. In an experiment carried out by Rizzolatti
and others, subjects were tested for their empathic responses to facial
expressions of disgust as measured by brain activation. The aim of the
experiment was to challenge the primacy of cognition in emotions by
emphasizing the ways in which spectators precognitively grasp the emotions
of others because of the determining role of neural simulation. In the course
of my paper, I will question the plausibility of such a mirror neuron explanation
of the disgust response.
ALAN JOHNSTON (UCL)
Dynamic Faces
The vast majority of work on human face perception has studied the frozen
facial image, a frame sampled from the dynamic procession of one transient
expression to another. To some degree this has been a necessary
simplification, both technically and theoretically, to allow progress in the
understanding of how we see faces and in discovering the neural structures
on which this process is based. In recent years it has become easier to
generate, manipulate, control and display moving faces and so progress in
understanding dynamic facial perception is gathering speed. However, the
past emphasis on static faces may have obscured a key role for movement in
forming the mechanisms of encoding not only moving faces but facial
structure in general. In redress, here we explore the central role of change in
the representation of faces.
MANDY MERCK
Recognition and celebrity
Philosophers remind us that the term ‘recognition’ has many meanings. In
The Struggle for Recognition (1995) Axel Honneth distinguishes recognition
by one’s family and close friends (‘love’) from that within the legally regulated
field of rights (‘respect’) and that of the social world of work (‘esteem’). Paul
Ricoeur opens The Course of Recognition (2005) with an extensive
investigation of the ‘rule-governed polysemy’ in the philosophical use of the
term, distinguishing recognition as identification of people or objects from
recognition as validation of a claim, recognition as gratitude for a gift or favour,
and recognition as the acceptance of someone as a leader. Ricoeur is most
interested in the combination of separateness and mutuality that characterizes
the relations of love and friendship. But en route he cites Luc Boltanski and
Laurent Thevenot on the ‘economies of standing’ in which we compete for the
form of recognition known as ‘renown’.
Andy Warhol (who knew a thing or two about the economics of renown)
famously contracted its commercial cycle to fifteen minutes. Although he is
best known for his hieratic silk screens of mega-celebrities like Elvis, Marilyn
and Mao, I want to go back to his reversal of recognition in his early 60s
representations of little or unknown figures, such as his ‘Thirteen Most
Wanted Men’, whose enlarged New York Police mugshots he painted on the
façade of Philip Johnson’s state pavilion at the 1964 World Fair. (These
men’s monumental exhibition itself survived only for a few days, until
Governor Rockefeller ordered the mural painted over.) The predecessor to
this censorable public registration of notoriety as desirability was its gay
registration in Warhol’s first Screen Tests, for a projected series titled ‘The
Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys’. It is the Screen Tests that I will discuss, in
terms of the recognisability – and defamiliarization – of Warhol’s more and
less famous subjects.
NATHALIE HERSCHDORFER
Making Faces: The New Photographic Portrait
Today many artists question the portrait, which is traditionally seen as the
reflection of the personality or a window open on the soul. We live in a time
where the nature of face has changed. For a long time, Western culture
conceived the face as a destiny. A face was fixed, static and had universal
expressions: humans had one single face from birth to death. Today this
belief has eroded: retouching and plastic surgery are no longer exceptional
practices. Not only the way we look at faces has changed, but also the way
we look at and make photographs. Nowadays, virtually anyone can wield the
photographic tools, quickly and with a minimum of instruction – a ‘photoshop’
in every home! We retouch our images, because we want to see “a better
reality”, a reality which seems more attractive to the gaze. Images are seen as
variants, different possibilities, not something definitive. Today, photographers
no longer believe that we know a person from the image of his/her face.
Questioning identity is a major topic in contemporary photography: artists are
constructing and exploring a new genre, what might be called the « antiportrait ». Digital technology has changed the appearance of photographic
portraits. They seem more stylized. Artists represent people who somehow
look real and artificial at the same time, striking a balance between the reality
of the flesh and the ideals of beauty. Studying the portrait as a photographic
genre makes us aware of how representations can be different in time and
depend on the culture in which they are produced. Representations change
because we never represent someone for what he is but according to the idea
we have of the person. Photography belongs to a cultural process, it betrays a
specific time, a specific society or culture. It raises questions, reflects
certainties, uncertainties, the dreams and torments of its society. The portrait
is dead, but the face is alive.
PAUL WHITE
Darwinian expression and the face of physiology
Darwin's work on the emotions is often viewed as a watershed in the history of
facial expression, challenging the theological assumptions that underpinned
Lavaterian physiognomy, and furnishing a 'real' geneaological connection
between human and animal likeness. Yet there is another, perhaps more
unsettling feature of Darwin's work, namely the severing of inner character
from outward appearance. Drawing on new developments in physiological
theory and practice, Darwin redefined the nature of expression as a set of
instinctual, reflex responses that took place beneath the surface of the skin.
Widely regarded by Darwin's predecessors as a medium of sympathy and
window to the soul, the face became a deceptive device, proving that the play
of mind and body was no more than a stage-set concealing a mechanism.