Joy. Sadness. Anger. Disgust. Surprise. Fear.

Six core emotions outlined by Charles Darwin in his groundbreaking 1872 book, 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals', where he claimed that certain facial movements universally revealed these underlying emotions, regardless of where you were from and how you grew up. Smiling meant happy, a scowl, anger, a frown, sadness. This simple and seemingly intuitive concept, though eventually challenged, endures until now, more than a century on, permeating our courts, classrooms, workplaces, and algorithms.

This project explores the application of some of those algorithms - facial recognition and expression detection algorithms - in an attempt to inject affect into the computer, something thought to be "uncomputable". Not with the aim of disproving the premise, but to revel in the abstracted imperfections of the underlying subverted logic. In this real-time interactive generative artwork, the viewer's face and expressions become its source of chance and randomness.*

In Darwin's own words from 'Expression', one can feel his wonder: "To discover how such habits had been acquired was perplexing in no small degree. The whole subject had to be viewed under a new aspect, and each expression demanded a rational explanation. This belief led me to attempt the present work, however imperfectly it may have been executed."

*This project requires camera access for live face detection and facial expression recognition. No data is stored.

Controls:
• Spacebar (or double-tap on mobile) takes a snapshot/selfie

Made with Javascript and p5js and includes Vladimir Mandic's fork of the FaceAPI library by Vincent Mühler
Created September 2023
Artist: Yazid