Dismantling the Face: Faciality and Architectural Space in the Age of “Control Societies”

Abstract

In the age of “control societies” there is a need to re-situate understandings of the face in architecture. Historical readings of the face in architecture remain rooted in an anthropomorphism that fails to consider current forms of “simulated surveillance” and the emerging non-human visualities that ensue from such a surveillance apparatus. The article considers the change from disciplinary surveillance, as observed in the Larkin Building, to today’s simulated surveillance. Referring to readings of the face by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Mark Cousins, the article traces alternative readings of facial codification. Toward this end, the “Eyes of the City” exhibition (2020) and the media installation, the diplorasis, are used to consider affective readings of the face that enable yet-to-be determined relations between human and non-human visualities. The aim of this article is to speculate on reversing the one-way visual control of space and the ensuing overdetermined architectural programming of the human.

Keywords:

• face
• face-recognition
• digital
• non-human vision
• control-societies
• discipline
• critical visuality
• surveillance

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Rima Sabina Aouf, “Carlo Ratti’s Eyes of the City Exhibition in Shenzhen tracks visitors with facial-recognition tech,” Dezeen, January 6, 2020. https://www.dezeen.com/2020/01/06/carlo-ratti-eyes-of-the-city-exhibition-shenzhen-facial-recognition-technology/ (accessed December 19, 2021).

2. Ibid.

3. Surveillance is defined as: “any collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered.” See David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001), 2.

4. Aouf, “Carlo Ratti’s Eyes of the City Exhibition”.

5. “Facial scan technology utilizes distinctive features of the human face in order to verify or identify individuals,” see: Samir Nanavati, Michael Thieme, and Raj Nanavati, Biometrics: Identity Verification in a Networked World (New York, NY: Wiley, 2002), 64.

6. “Biometric technologies as we know them today have been made possible by explosive advances in computing power and have been made necessary by the near universal connectedness of computers around the world,” see: Nanavati, Thieme, and Nanavati, Biometrics, xv.

7. Igea Troiani and Suzanne Ewing, “Introduction,” in Visual Research Methods in Architecture (Bristol: Intellect, 2021), 3.

8. See: Penelope Haralambidou, “The Stereoscopic Veil,” Architecture Research Quarterly 11, no. 1 (2007): 36–52; Penelope Haralambidou, The Blossoming of Perspective: A Study by Penelope Haralambidou (London: Domobaal editions, 2006); Penelope Haralambidou, Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Penelope Haralambidou, “Stereoscopy and the Architecture of Visual Space,” in Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, ed. Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 313–330; Nat Chard, Drawing Indeterminate Architecture, Indeterminate Drawings of Architecture: 3 (Heidelberg: Springer Verlag GmbH, 2005); Nat Chard, “Photography as an Agent of Architectural Proposition and Provocation,” in Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, ed. Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 331–352; Richard Difford, “In Defense of Pictorial Space: Stereoscopic Photography and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century,” in Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, ed. Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 295–312.

9. See Anthony Vidler, “Architecture Dismembered,” in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 69. For an overview of the representation of face in architecture with reference to Francesco di Giorgio, Vincenzo Scamozzi, Jacques Francois Blondel, and William Chambers see: Michael Hill and Peter Kohane, “‘The Signature of Architecture’: Compositional Ideas in the Theory of Profiles,” Architectural Histories 3, no. 1 (2015): 18–21.

10. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” [1886] in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873–1893, trans. Harry Francis Malgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (New York, NY: Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1994), 151.

11. Brian Irwin, “Architecture as Participation in the World: Merleau-Ponty, Wölfflin, and the Bodily Experience of the Built Environment,” Architecture Philosophy 4, no. 1 (2019): 94.

12. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” 152.

13. Irwin, “Architecture as Participation in the World,” 96.

14. Hill and Kohane, “‘The Signature of Architecture’,” 10.

15. Colin Rowe, “James Stirling: A Highly Personal and very Disjointed Memoir,” in James Stirling: Buildings and Projects, ed. Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford (New York, NY: Rizzoli Publications, 1984), 22–23.

16. Anthony Vidler, “Losing Face,” in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 88.

17. Ibid., 89.

18. Ibid.

19. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management [1911] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003).

20. Luis Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy [1991], trans. Gina Carino (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 166.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 169.

23. Ibid., 170.

24. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” [1990], October, Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), 3.

25. Ibid., 5.

26. Ibid., 4.

27. Ibid.

28. Lyon, Surveillance Society, 7.

29. Ross Anderson, “The Panopticon is already here,” The Atlantic, September 2020 Issue. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/china-ai-surveillance/614197/?fbclid=IwAR0RKXHqBbtbK-2Uv1GdLvSJaqATOgacUK9NMUEL5luxFrvNIF-HqJ8DUhE (accessed December 23, 2021).

30. Lyon, Surveillance Society, 35.

31. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980], trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 196.

32. Lyon, Surveillance Society, 70.

33. Ibid.

34. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, “The Mirror of Design,” in Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (Zurich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2016), 15.

35. Lyon, Surveillance Society, 75.

36. Ibid., 83.

37. Colomina and Wigley, “The Mirror of Design,” 16–17.

38. Mark Cousins, “The Morality of the Face,” lecture, Architectural Association, London, March 5, 2018.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. According to Deleuze an affection-image is “that which occupies the gap between an action and a reaction, that which absorbs an external action and reacts on the inside.” See: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image [1983], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2005), 221. The affect for Deleuze is expressed by the cinematic close-up of the face, for example, where “… the face or equivalent gathers and expresses the affect as a complex entity, affects are not individuated like people and things, but nevertheless they do not blend into the indifference of the world. They have singularities which enter into virtual conjunction and each time constitute a complex entity.” See Deleuze, Cinema 1, 106. The action image is “a sign which refers to its object by a material link. Used here in order to designate the link of an action (or of an effect of action) to a situation which is not given, but merely inferred …” See: Deleuze, Cinema 1, 222. On the relations between action and reaction Deleuze writes, “[b]y incurving perceived things render their unstable facet towards me, at the same time as my delayed reaction, which has become action, learns to use them.” See: Deleuze, Cinema 1, 67. Then Deleuze, following Henri Bergson, writes: “‘[p]erception is master of space in the exact measure in which action is master of time.’” See: Deleuze, Cinema 1, 67.

42. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 199.

43. Ibid., 201.

44. Felix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis [1979], trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 90.

45. For more on this see: Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder, “Introduction,” in Architecture and the Smart City (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).

46. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation [1981], trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 15–16.

47. On the “affect-image” see Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and Mark Cousins, “The Morality of the Face”. For the original publication of Cinema 1 see: Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1. L'Image-Mouvement (Paris: Les Èditions de Minuit, 1983).

48. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image [1985], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 106.

49. Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, 91.

50. Ibid., 91.

51. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6.

52. Ibid., 5.

53. Mark Poster, “An Introduction to Vilém Flusser's Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future?” In Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future? trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxii.

54. Maša Galič, Tjerk Timan, and Bert-Jaap Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation,” Philosophy of Technology 30 (2017): 27.

55. Ibid., 22.

56. Cousins, “The Morality of the Face.”

57. Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, 104.

58. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus [1994], trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 15.

59. Ibid., 16.

60. Bart Verschaffel, “The interior as architectural principle,” Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

George Themistokleous

George Themistokleous [BA (Hons); MA; MArch; Ph.D.] is an architectural designer, media artist, and senior lecturer at the Leicester School of Architecture (UK). He is the director of para-sight—www.para-sight.net—an interdisciplinary spatial practice. His research explores the spatio-temporal environments of the digitized subject via assemblages of older and emerging visual media, in relation to modes of digital control. His custom-made devices, participatory multimedia installations, and writing have been presented and exhibited internationally on various platforms including Future Architecture Platform 2019, Venice Architecture Biennale 2018, and ACM Siggraph. He is a member and co-editor of ThisThingCalledTheory (Routledge, 2016).