18-22 November 2015 @ BCAC New Media Window Project 2015-2016 at the Chinese Pavillion / Venice Biennale
Touching is the new Scanning. The artists deconstruct and turn around control technologies and sensory perception to facilitate intimate meeting experiences: “Saving Face is an experimental technological bio-feedback system for a poetic ‘meeting-through-touching ritual’. With the help of a personal ‘Touching Face Scan’, participants caress their own faces, to connect online with family, friends and strangers worldwide. They become tangible and visible for each other in a relational process, a ‘social sculpture’ in which we invite them to endlessly meet, caress, mirror and merge.”
Saving Face by Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat is the Finissage Event of the Chinese Pavillion curated by Cui Qiao, Founder and director of the new Beijing Contemporary Art Center.
Saving Face is a performance where your face becomes a tangible social interface. The ritual includes an interactive city sculpture with a camera connected to an urban screen and integrated face-recognition technologies. By caressing your face you ‘paint’ your portrait on the screen, where it appears and then slowly merges with the portraits of previous visitors. Each composed portrait identity is saved into a user generated database, to be printed as a Saving Face Passport.
Image: © Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat