I saw you perform at Brown University in 1997 or 1998, and was fascinated by your work. I’ve thought about it often since. I have a bunch of questions for you, and a project I hope you’ll be interested in. My email is joexavjoexav@gmail.com. If you have a moment, please drop send me an email so I can explain.

Thanks,
Damian

To answer your first question. The human facial hardware is capable of displaying a large range of muscle contraction configurations. If a human would train itself to individually trigger the muscles, it could take advantage of this space of possible faces and make up any of these configuration patterns. This though is not that easy to do for a human, but can be done.

The real difference lies in movement patterns as controlling the facial muscles by a digital computer instead of the brain, enables very precise and consistent timing, something a neural control system is not very good at. Facial resonance phenomena as seen in my video ‘electric-eigen portraits’ is of course not voluntarily possible. In my PhD dissertation work am starting to call this type of control post-neural to signify the difference.

Your second question is a bit more difficult to answer, let me explain. If you put up an expression of say joy, you do start to feel that way, because it is the brain that’s initiating this action. Although the facial muscles have sensors embedded (muscle spindles) that report contraction level back to the central nervous system, I have never experienced the artificial emotion displayed on my face. Also in my performances expression patterns change very quickly and I don’t think people naturally change their emotional state at that speed, but in post-modern times one never knows.

Anything else?

I’ve got two questions for you:

Can you electronically force your face to create expressions that don’t have any natural parallel?

Does electronically stimulating your face to create an emotion have a similar psychological effect?

Have fun