Dr Karl Broome Is currently a research fellow in the sociology department working on the project ‘Supporting Shy Users in Pervasive Computing’. He has been at Lighthouse over the last ten days – helping, writing notes –
“Oh, oh. Is it on? I am not being filmed am I?” The man seems to beconcerned with whether or not his face, and more importantly his facial expressions are being recorded. Our core five facial muscles work throughout the day expressing emotions; concurrently others are constantly reading our facial expressions. Numerous people have come forward to allow Tina to film them expressing a broad range of emotions in front of the camera. As Tina has commented, this is literally an intensively ‘emotional’ experience with the process often resulting in those being filmed breaking down in tears. A very intimate and moving process for all involved, and Tina is aware of her privilege in going through these very personal journeys with her participants, who she has acknowledged have revealed very personal and precious information to her. Visitors to the Chameleon exhibit have frequently asked if it is their own face displayed on Pixy. Despite not being able to recognise whether or not it is actually their face, discovering whether it is in fact their face seems to make a considerable difference to how they experience the ‘image’, and perhaps more importantly how they think others may experience the image. Maybe the experience of being ‘read’, and thus presented back through Chameleon, inaugurates a new moment in the experience of ‘myself as other’ (see Celia Lury’s ‘Prosthetic Culture’). In some sense, the concern exhibited by visitors maybe the thought that Chameleon has potentially taken something profoundly personal and defining of the individual: their emotional self and made it ‘public’. Where as a photo image, or a film can be taken to retain the ‘visible’ surface expressions of ‘self’, Chameleon through reading these expression probes even more deeper, and understood as revealing more deeper thoughts and feelings. Is there a fear that the ‘mind reader’ technology has the power to reveal the ‘truth’ of who we are – how we feel ‘inside’? Thus make publicly available our neuroses, reveal our ‘inner demons’, warts and all? Or maybe still, make public that which we are unaware, something like our ‘unconscious’ selves. In a sense, the emotional dialogue afforded by Chameleon shows “look what my emotions and feelings do to other people”. The video in front of us becomes a reverberation of ourselves, we feel ‘I am responsible for this’ – ‘I am driving this’. If we choose to ‘interact’ with Chameleon, we have little scope for strategically controlling the reception of our mediated self-presentation, and its subsequent reverberations. According to Baudrillard, we now exist in culture where we live as if we have a video recorder in our heads: we are always transforming ourselves in anticipation of what we might look like as an image (Lury 1998:78). Perhaps it is this heightened self-awareness, and anticipation of ourselves, or of visual emotional response attributed to our ‘selves’ being made a ‘image’ that makes people feel more comfortable in interacting with the Pixy than interacting directly with the face reading software for any length of time.
