Coding Actions, Making Faces

In my dissertation project, Coding Actions, Making Faces, I explore the emergence and development of the sciences and technologies for understanding human emotion with facial expressions throughout the second half of the twentieth century in the United States. Human scientists — including anthropologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists — developed elaborate techniques to record and analyze the movements of the human body as a means to understand the human. Among them was the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), developed by psychologist Paul Ekman and his colleagues in the 1970s. Renowned for his theory of universality in human facial expressions and basic emotions, Ekman developed FACS to isolate facial expressions from the context of their emergence and reduce them into physiological movements of the facial muscles of the human. 

Charting the trajectory of FACS through the rising wave of computer vision in the 1980s and the recent adoption of information technologies to surveillance systems in the 2000s, my dissertation will show the different social and cultural conditions that empowered the sciences and technologies of face analysis. I will also explore the data-centric vision shared by behavioral scientists, which distinguished them from other human scientists who were against reducing human subjects into scalable forms. By delving into the politics associated with the conflicts between these two groups, I hope to suggest deeper historical and cultural implications of face-reading technologies in the data-driven informational world.

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