Heewon Kim

Coding Actions, Making Faces explores the emergence and development of the sciences and technologies for understanding human emotion with facial expressions throughout the second half of the 20th century. I argue that face-analyzing technologies reconfigured the human face into a codable entity, thus normalizing and legitimating the use of such intrusive techniques in analyzing every human being with a face. Drawing from the documents and films in the collections of psychologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists, along with institutional records, I will illustrate the cultural, intellectual, and institutional conditions in which documenting the movement of the human face was conceived as a desirable practice. Through this work, I hope to explore the historical and cultural implications of human-reading technologies in the data-driven informational world. I plan to use the collections at four Consortium member institutions which hold the materials of different regimes of face transcribing technologies.