Comment

Comment by Arthur Elsenaar on August 25, 2008 at 8:26am

Hi Laura,

If by 'flow' you mean the strength of the applied currents, in general one can say the larger the muscle the more energy is needed, hence higher stimulating currents. But because of the use of surface electrodes, it's not clear if the muscle or nerve is stimulated, but stimulating nerves does require less current.

In the face, like the rest of the human muscles, training can change the muscle fibre type population or the ratio of white and red muscle fibres, which directly translates into fast response time vs tenacity. So by training a dedicated face-ist should be able to build faster facial muscles.

I haven't noticed any difference, but I'm not hooked up frequently enough for this to cause an effect. Although I have become more aware of my facial muscles and as a result can voluntarily trigger more expressions than before and have had the odd first time experience of a really tired face.

ae

Comment by Laura Mello on August 24, 2008 at 8:57am

Hi Arthur
It´s really an amazing image of a face transformation...
I would be curious to know how strong is the flow into the simple muscles, is it different depending on the muscle? Do you feel your face´s muscle are kind of "trained" or do you have a different feel for your face since you started working on the project?
Thank you for the piece!
Laura

Comment by Arthur Elsenaar on August 14, 2008 at 3:45pm

The work presented here is a recording of an actual performance at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. This type of performance art can be filed under media art which has a high level of artistic exploration of the newly created medium of the computer-controlled human face. Perhaps some critics might call it post-biological, I have simply coined this work the term face-ism.

But how it's been labelled is mainly dependent on fashion in thought, in previous centuries this type of work could just have been called demonstrations, a public show of something new or interesting. If you're interested in the history of electric performance art, I would recommend to head over to my website and get an article on that topic that I wrote with my colleague Remko Scha.

Comment by CreationEditor on August 13, 2008 at 5:02am

I really like your work. I guess it is currently mainly research-based/focused and how do you see it presented as a final piece: video/ live...?

I have seen similar work by the Australian artist Stelarc using electric current to control limbs.

Comment by Arthur Elsenaar on August 12, 2008 at 6:44pm

Ok Marlon, I'll try to quickly explain this piece of formal choreography.

The facial muscles are indeed involuntarily controlled by a dedicated and sophisticated computer system generating muscle stimulating electrical currents. The system allows for very fine simultaneous control over the facial muscles, from totally relaxed to fully contracted. By bolting a MIDI interface to the system, the computer-controlled human face is instantly turned into a visual instrument that can be easily synced to for instance music.

Now the fun is to generate patterns of facial movement and the way to achieve these movement patterns has become an issue in itself. We have developed methods or algorithms to do just that and this is what we call computer generated or algorithmic facial choreography.

FaceShift is a prime example of this way of working as two very simple repetitive movement patterns are generated for each side of the face. When the process is started, both sides of the face show the same pattern, for instance the eyebrows are momentarily lifted, but the repetition rate on one side of the face is slightly faster than the other. Slowly the symmetrical facial movement patterns get out of sync with each other until full asymmetry is reached. Then it reverses and falls back into symmetry again. We do this kind of process for different muscle groups of the face and also change the speed and repetition frequency to increase gradually, so at the end of the piece the face becomes a total distortion, a chaos-like appearance.

The sound track is generated as well by two DECtalk voice synth computers, one for each side of the face and brought about in stereo. The voices simply call out the muscle identification numbers. The piece has a resemblance to tape loop experiments done in the fifties and sixties by for instance Steve Reich, but then a visual/auditive version thereof.

Regarding 'coupling' and if I can affect the output. The facial anatomy is quite unique in the human body as the facial muscles don't have a clear antagonist counter balancing a specific muscle action as in the skeletal muscle system. This allows for the weird stuff one can do with external control over the face and also why one can't really fight deliberately what's going on in the face. Also many times it all goes too fast to follow, so attempting to do so is senseless.

The human facial hardware is really magnificent, it's the brain that is the limiting factor to unleash its full capabilities. These days I like to call the brain an exhibitionist tyrant that's only interested in showing its own inner state. How boring, we've seen that for too long, external control liberates the face to let it operate according to its own characteristics.

How it feels? Typical feeling of currents flowing through the body I would say, it's not really painful or what is pain really? My latest system has provisions to increase on issues of comfort and this has improved irritability of the stimulating pulses.

Hope this answered your questions somewhat.

Comment by Marlon Barrios Solano on August 12, 2008 at 1:24pm

Thank you Arthur!
Can you explain a bit the process...
control of muscle with electrical stimulation...?
how does it feel?
I s the pattern of the algorithms in coupling with your body?can you affect the output?
great!
M