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Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00651
- Thesis Title
- Face, A Keyword Story: Metadata Prosthetics in the German Search for Facial Expression from Printed Media to Media Art
- Author
- Devon Schiller
- E-mail
- devonschiller AT gmail.com
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- Master of Arts, Advanced
- Year
- 2017
- Number of Pages
- 145
- University
- Danube University Krems, Austria
- Thesis Supervisor
- Ana Peraica
- Supervisor e-mail
- anaperaica AT gmail.com
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Oliver Grau
- Language(s) of Thesis
- English
- Department / Discipline
- Image Science/Media Art Histories
- Copyright Ownership
- Devon Schiller
- Languages Familiar to Author
- English, German, Nonverbal Body Language (Facial Expression and Gesture)
- URL where full thesis can be found
- www.academia.edu/35547447/FACE_A_KEYWORD_STORY_Metadata_Prosthetics_in_the_German_Search_for_Facial_Expression_from_Printed_Media_to_Media_Art
- Keywords
- Affective Computing, Digital Archives, Digital Humanities, Facial Action Coding System (FACS), Facial Expression, Historical Psychology, Image Science, Metadata, Physiognomy
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- With this Thesis, I problematize the intellectual historiography behind keyword coding–or key-wording–for facial expressions of emotion, emotion-based, and emotions-like phenomena in the German socio-cultural media imaginary. Using digital research techniques to perform a federated query that links word-organized archival content, I depart from the new Media Art Research Thesaurus to comparatively analyse keyword-coded information resources–or “artworks”–on the online Graphic Art Collection of Göttweig Abbey and the Archive of Digital Art: Johann Nepomuk Strixner’s 1808-1815 Master Study of Albrecht Dürer’s The Four Apostles, and Julius von Bismarck, Benjamin Maus, and Richard Whelmer’s 2008, 2010, and 2014 Public Face. By this meta-analysis I will prove how, in this our Algorithmic Age, that to ask the “face question” calls for a digital literacy in the “black box” keyword concepts by which the artistic, scientific, and technological cultural sectors today operationalize facial expressions into universal as well as utilitarian attributes, and code individual expressors into typologies. I pose that these keyword metadata function along with image-resources to “turn real lives into writing” for the computation, datafication, and even commodification of the facial expression of emotion. But I also propose that such keyword metadata have, since at least the Age of Print, functioned as an “auxiliary organ” or technological prosthesis for extending naked or natural perception of our own faces as well as the faces of others, and thereby overcome the limitations of our own emotional intelligence.