Electrodes, film and Algorithms: The Clinical and Colonial Epistemology of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS)
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Vyžádané přednášky |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | The lecture is proposed as a genealogy of the emotional data. After an initial presentation of the theory of basic emotions, I contextualize historically Paul Ekman's expedition to New Guinea. The criticisms made by cultural anthropologists of Ekman's approach and results in his early work are here recentered on the problem concerning what at the time was called “cross-culturality”. The aim of the presentation is to analyze and discuss the specific use of visual media by Ekman as an extractivist “data practice” (Kim, 2024) within the issue of the approach to film and photography in psychology and ethnographic studies in the postwar US between the 60 and the 70’, and specifically in connection with the NIH (National Institute of Health) and the Smithsonian’s “urgent anthropology” (Link, 2016). In this respect, the emergence of the field of visual anthropology in the 70s is indicated as a political reaction against the neo-positivistic approach in anthropology that has been indicated with the term ‘salvage paradigm’ (Grimshaw, 2008). Drawing on recent literature on data practices (Ricaurte 2019; Couldry & Mejias, 2018), I attempt to show how Ekman's experiments in Papua New Guinea may be seen as a kind of “primitive accumulation” of emotional data - interposing the clinical/physiological gaze (Foucault 1963, Cartwright 1995) on the neocolonial one - anticipating and grounding today's postfordist extraction and financialization of biometric big data. In the last part, I point how automated emotion recognition technologies - which are largely based on the measurement and taxonomy of facial expressions derived from Ekman and Friesen’s FACS – are a chapter in the long social history of psychotechnics, which we can trace back to the use of electrodes in the physiognomic techniques of the 19th century. |
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