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Understanding Representation

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Affect as Medium, or the `Digital-Facial-Image'

Mark B.N. Hansen

Department of English at Princeton University, mbhansen{at}princeton.edu

By exploring a number of contemporary new media artworks that focus on the digitized image of the face, I propose the encounter with the `digital-facial-image' (DFI) as a new paradigm for the human interface with digital data. Whereas the currently predominant model of the human-computer-interface (HCI) functions precisely by reducing the wide-bandwidth of embodied human expressivity to a fixed repertoire of functions and icons, the DFI transfers the site of this interface from computer-embodied functions to the open-ended, positive feedback loop connecting digital information with the entire affective register operative in the embodied viewer-participant. For this reason, the DFI allows us to reconceptualize the very notion of the interface: by bypassing investment in more effective technical `solutions', it invests in the body's capacity to supplement technology - the potential it holds for `collaborating' with the information presented by the interface in order to create images.

Key Words: affect • cinema • Deleuze • digital-facial-image (DFI) • facialization • human-computer-interface (HCI) • new media art • Pierre Lévy • virtualization

Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 2, No. 2, 205-228 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/14704129030022004
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