Routledge/FACETS Advances in Face Studies – serie

This original and interdisciplinary volume explores the contemporary semiotic dimensions of the face from both scientific and sociocultural perspectives, putting forward several traditions, aspects, and signs of the human utopia of creating a hybrid face.The book semiotically delves into the multifaceted realm of the digital face, exploring its biological and social functions, the concept of masks, the impact of COVID-19, AI systems, digital portraiture, symbolic faces in films, viral communication, alien depictions, personhood in video games, online intimacy, and digital memorials. The human face is increasingly living a life that is not only that of the biological body but also that of its digital avatar, spread through a myriad of new channels and transformable through filters, post-productions, digital cosmetics, all the way to the creation of deepfakes. The digital face expresses new and largely unknown meanings, which this book explores and analyzes through an interdisciplinary but systematic approach.The volume will interest researchers, scholars, and advanced students who are interested in digital humanities, communication studies, semiotics, visual studies, visual anthropology, cultural studies, and, broadly speaking, innovative approaches about the meaning of the face in present-day digital societies.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This original and interdisciplinary volume explores the contemporary semiotic dimensions of the face from both scientific and sociocultural perspectives, putting forward several traditions, aspects, and signs of the human utopia of creating a hybrid face.The book semiotically delves into the multifaceted realm of the digital face, exploring its biological and social functions, the concept of masks, the impact of COVID-19, AI systems, digital portraiture, symbolic faces in films, viral communication, alien depictions, personhood in video games, online intimacy, and digital memorials. The human face is increasingly living a life that is not only that of the biological body but also that of its digital avatar, spread through a myriad of new channels and transformable through filters, post-productions, digital cosmetics, all the way to the creation of deepfakes. The digital face expresses new and largely unknown meanings, which this book explores and analyzes through an interdisciplinary but systematic approach.The volume will interest researchers, scholars, and advanced students who are interested in digital humanities, communication studies, semiotics, visual studies, visual anthropology, cultural studies, and, broadly speaking, innovative approaches about the meaning of the face in present-day digital societies.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Machine-Readable Faces investigates how facial images have been operationalised, reshaping the conditions under which identity becomes intelligible and computable. Moving across visual semiotics, digital humanities, and computational studies, the book traces the emergence of facial data—from early digitisation experiments to dataset-driven practices—and shows how the face has been reconfigured as a proxy within technical infrastructures.Along this trajectory, facial archives, large-scale image datasets, and training processes within computational infrastructures are analysed at the intersection of visual culture and computational modelling. The book develops a theoretical framework centred on three operative praxes—modelling, archiving, and tagging—through which facial images function as both meta-linguistic operators and infrastructural agents of recognition. This framework offers a critical rearticulation of the epistemological and cultural implications of data-driven identity.Grounded in an interdisciplinary exchange, the book will interest scholars and graduate students working on machine vision, digital culture, and the philosophy of technology, as well as those engaged in visual culture, media sociology, and feminist and gender studies.

Faces and the City advances the understanding of the role of faces and face representations, their meanings and interpretations, in physical and digital urban space.This comprehensive study builds a typology of biological, represented and digital faces within urban space and presents an interdisciplinary approach to the facial presence in urban space, which it is used to analyse in depth urban faces and facial representation in public art, monuments, memorials as well as memorial practices, including digital ones. This innovative volume will interest PhD students and scholars in semiotics, visual communication, digital humanities, cultural geography and urban studies, as well as those working in urban planning and design, architecture, memory studies and art history.

Focusing on masks and faces as figures and objects that carry ethical and political meanings, this volume examines the scientific, cultural, visual, and philosophical histories and traditions in which they are imbricated and which allow them to gather force and to become central to how human relationships are made.Offering interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives on masks and faces, the book studies the prominent role they play in shaping ideals and norms of political personhood; their deployment as evidence in the creation of racist hierarchies; and their role in demarcating the human and non-human. Through historical and theoretical analyses of different case studies from around the world, the book offers a global perspective that will enable readers to reflect on the interweaving of aesthetics, ethics and politics in the making of faces and masks into figures around which the visual world is organized and valorized. Moving from past to future, from essays that examine methods for facial classification and the production of facial casts in the service of racial science, to essays that reflect on the future of the human face in light of deepfake technologies, or in relation to the posthuman turn, the collection historicizes modern Western conceptions of masks and faces, and the conceptual, ethical, and political hierarchies in which they are embedded.This book will be an invaluable work for researchers, librarians, advanced students, and curious learned readers who are interested in philosophy, history of science, visual studies, and cultural studies. More broadly, it will appeal to those engaged with innovative approaches to the study of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, as these are explored through the figures of masks and faces, as well as through reflections on the meaning of the face in present-day digital societies.