Bryan Truitt on Mediating the Human Face
The BCNM is pleased to offer several undergraduate research fellowships each year. Undergraduates are paired with our graduate students, who mentor them in research methodology. This year, Bryan Truitt worked on Julia Irwin's Mediating the Human Face. Read more about his experience below.
During the time of my research fellowship on the Mediation of the Human Face, I focused on the development of computer algorithms which classify emotions from human facial expressions in academic research labs during the late 1990s, as well as the nascent use of computer vision algorithms to identify human faces in public spaces in the early 2000s. I have paid close attention to the relationship between private industry and academic computer vision research labs, as well as the use of private contractors to implement surveillance technologies for public spaces. Through a cross-disciplinary reading of psychology, cognitive science, and computer vision research I mapped a genealogy of knowledge which formed the foundation for the development of computerized human emotion recognition algorithms. My work to historicize the underlying values of human facial identification has centered on the analysis of conference proceedings, academic papers, patent applications, press releases, and other documents, where I employed a critical reading towards the language used to frame these technologies and their imagined use from the perspective of the people and institutions developing and implementing them, with an attunement to the ways infrastructures of surveillance implement affordances which can accumulate heightened control, bias, and oppression.