Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Facial Puppetry

Facial Puppetry from Jason Saragih on Vimeo.

According to a survey completed by the Council for Research Excellence, as of 2009, adults in the United States spend on average 8.5 hours out of every day exposed to screens: in bed, in airports, at the supermarket, in taxi cabs, at McDonalds, in this very blog post. Throughout your day you are constantly confronted by information presented to you on screens.

There are many, many people who are certain that our brains are changing in significant ways to adapt to our time spent with screens. And as our brains change, so do our identities.

Take a look at the video above. The kind of facial puppetry Jason Saragih has created might allow us to show a face to the world (when we are online) that is completely different than the face we were born with: a face that shares all of the warmth and complexity of our facial expressions, but without the attachment to our physical identities.

How are we going to deal with this coming change? Is it a good or bad thing that people will soon be able to look skinnier or fatter, or like President Obama, or like a tiger, or like Naruto? How might this impact how we view ourselves? More importantly, how might this impact how we view other people, when we know that the face they show to us may only be a mask?

by Mr. AB

9 comments:

  1. This makes me want to make myself look like chuck Norris and skype my friends. It is amazing that we have this technology to make movies and things to make characters look real.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is incredible. It's always amazing to see how much things we can do with the computer. I've always wanted to imagine myself with a goatee, but imagine being a ninja on Gmail.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Its creepy the average time a that people spend on the computer. How will our bodies adapt to so much time spent on them is surely going to be interesting. I wonder if we will lose two of our fingers and have keyboards made for our mutation like on those SciFi movies!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Its awsome how people can manage to be able to make these stuff, make yourself with another face on the computer. Its really awsome that you can get your face to change compleately.

    ReplyDelete
  5. When put in such a crude way, this almost sparks a sense of sadness personally, because electronics and computarization is ending common life and interaction we have known since man kind has been around. Sure it must be fun and enternaining to mess around with some of the gadgets that exist today, but it is very sad to think that humans are not going to be traditional and authentic in the future because of computers. It is all going to be fake.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I wonder if someday, as humans we are going to lose our identity, or our consciousness by living in the "two-dimensional world of screens," in the words of Kerry O'Brien. I wonder if one day, we wont associate ourselves with our physical bodies, or even the workings of our mind.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I think this could somehow lead to being able to change your facial features to appear like a completely different person. Anyone could impersonate the president or someone you know to be able to blackmail,kidnap, murder etc... This is an awesome application but it could be dangerous.

    ReplyDelete
  8. It is amazing how they figured out the points of the most movement on a face to mirror every twitch and curl on the computer.

    ReplyDelete
  9. But Min Hee, if anyone was able to impersonate the president or your mom, wouldn't we need to rethink how we identify people anyway?

    ReplyDelete