The face has had a privileged status in visual media, enrapturing cinematic audiences with its beauty and intensity of emotion. Yet, the study of the face and its social relevance is also the subject of pseudo-sciences like physiognomy and eugenics. This article examines how the media help to capture the intimate details inscribed within the face in what I will argue is an artificial discourse of authenticity, identity, and intimacy by looking at how media have affected the way we perform such functions like self-identification and socialization. I attempt to trace how new technological developments in face recognition and artificial intelligence affect the way we inhabit our own faces, and how media have made it possible for us to inhabit the face of another (as with the deepfake or data analytics).
AgambenGiorgio (2011) Identity without the person. In: Nudities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 46–54
2.
AnggoMustaminArapuLa (2018) Face recognition using the Fisherface method. Journal of Physics Conference Series1028: 012119.
3.
BalázsBéla (1970) ‘The close-up’ and ‘the face of man’. In: Theory of the Film, trans. EdithBone. New York, NY: Dover, pp. 304–311
4.
BarthesRoland (1972 [1957]) Romans in films. In: Mythologies, trans. AnnetteLavers. New York, NY: Noonday Press, pp. 26–28
5.
BarthesRoland (1981) Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.
6.
BaudrillardJean (1983) In the Shadow of the Silent Majority . . . Or the End of the Social, trans. PaulFossPaulPattonJohnJohnson. New York, NY: Semiotext(e).
7.
BledsoeWoodrowBrowningIben (1959) Pattern recognition and reading by machine. In: Eastern Joint IRE-AIEE-ACM Computer Conference Proceedings, pp. 225–232. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1460299.1460326 (accessed 22 August 2025).
8.
BoydRyan L.PennebakerJames W. (2017) Language-based personality: A new approach to personality in a digital world. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences18: 63–68.
9.
BrowneSimone. (2015) Dark Matters: On Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.
CameronAllan (2021) Dimensions of the digital face: Flatness, contour and the grid. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies27(4): 868–881.
11.
ChunSoon AeAvinash PaturuVenkataYuanShengcheng, et al (2019) Crime prediction model using deep neural networks. In: Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, pp. 512–514. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3325112.3328221 (accessed 22 August 2025).
12.
DeleuzeGillesGuattariFelix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. BrianMassumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
13.
Didi-HubermanGeorges (2004) Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. AlisaHartz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
14.
EkmanPaul (1992) Facial expression of emotions: An old controversy, new findings. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society335(1273): 63–69
15.
EpsteinJean (1977) Magnification, and other writings. October3(2): 9–25.
16.
FaziBeatrice M. (2019) Digital aesthetics: The discrete and the continuous. Body & Society36(1): 3–26.
17.
GallowayAlexander (2012) The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity Press.
18.
GatesKelly (2011) Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. New York, NY: NYU Press.
19.
GibsonMary (2000) Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology. Westport, CT: Praeger.
20.
Gluck-ThalerAaron (2024) Identity instrumentalized: Pattern recognition as an epistemology of surveillance, 1960–66. Technology and Culture65(4): 1161–1193.
21.
GoffmanErving (1967) Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
GunningTom (1997) In your face: Physiognomy, photography and the gnostic mission of early cinema. Modernism/Modernity4(1): 1–29.
24.
HeinsLaura (2016) The ‘psyche of the white man’ and the mass face on film: Béla Balázs between racialist and Marxist physiognomics. New German Critique127: 59–89.
HollidayChristopher (2021) Rewriting the stars: Surface tensions and gender troubles in the online media production of digital deepfakes. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies27(4): 899–918.
27.
IzardCarol E. (1971) The Face of Emotion. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
28.
KosinskiMichal (2021) Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images. Nature, 11January. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1 (accessed 23 August 2025).
29.
KosinkiMichalStillwellDavidGraepelThore (2013) Private traits and attributes are predicable from digital records of human behavior. PNAS10(15): 5802–5805. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1218772110
30.
KittlerFriedrich (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
31.
KornJonathan W.AshbyNathaniel J.S.SadeghianRoozbeh (2019) A deep neural network model to predict criminality using image processing. [This article was retracted by Springer; its original press release can be found here: https://archive.is/N1HVe (accessed 17 December 2022)].
32.
LevinasEmmanuel (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. AlphonsoLingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press
MatzSandra C.KosinskiMichalNaveGideon, et al (2017) Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion. PNAS114(48): 12714–12719.
38.
OffertFabian (2021) Latent deep space: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in the sciences. Media + Environment (/)3(2): 1–12.
39.
OffertFabianBellPeter (2020) Perceptual bias and technical metapictures: Critical machine vision as a humanities challenge. AI & Society36: 1133–1134.
Ravetto-BiagioliKriss (2017) Defacing the close-up. In: LübeckerNikolajRugoDaniele (eds) James Benning Environments. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 143–159.
45.
Ravetto-BiagioliKriss (2022) Dancing with and within the digital domain. Body & Society27(2): 3–31.
46.
SerresMichel (1982 [1979]) The Parasite, trans. LawrenceSchehr. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
47.
SimmelGeorg (1993 [1907]) Soziologie der Sinne. In: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, Ges. Ausgabe, 8. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 276–292.
48.
SmithBrian Cantwell (2019) The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
49.
StevensNikkiKeyesOs (2021) Seeing infrastructure: Race, facial recognition and the politics of data. Cultural Studies35(4–5): 833–853.
50.
SuwajanakornSupasornSeitzSteven M.Kemelmacher-ShlizermanIra (2017) Synthesizing Obama: Learning lip sync from audio. ACM Transactions on Graphics36(4): 95.
Van NattaMeridethChenPaulHerbekSavannah, et al (2020) The rise and regulation of thermal facial recognition technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Journal of Law and the Biosciences7(1): lsaa038.
53.
WangYilunKosinskiMichal (2018) Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology114: 246–257.
54.
WatersKeithTerzopoulosDemetri (1992) The computer synthesis of expressive faces. The Philosophical Findings of the Royal Society335(1273): 87–93.
55.
WollenPeter (1989) Cinema/Americanism/The Robot. New Formations8: 7–34
56.
WuXiaolinZhangXi (2016) Automated inference on criminality using face images. Available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v1.pdf (accessed 23 August 2025).
57.
YouyouWuKosinskiMichalStillwellDavid (2015) Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA112(4): 1036–1040.
