About Face: investigating the multiple potentialities of Cerniello’s Danielle Kristina Fiedrich FPA 824: New Approaches to Moving-Image Studies Dr. Laura U. Marks April 21, 2015

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Through slow-morphing animated portrait photographs, Anthony Cerniello’s animation

Danielle makes visible facial transformations, young child becoming old woman. Created from a

series of photographs of an extended family, Danielle oscillates between a fictitious and real

subject. While the actual subject of Danielle is the inspiration for and exists within the work, the

trajectory of the subject in Danielle is manufactured through digital manipulation. The animation

engages representations of the transforming female face as well as the effect on subjectivity,

both for the singular subject in Danielle and the viewer. Though the way in which the face

transforms can be interpreted as the process of aging1 - generating an anxious, affective

response – this paper will attempt to consider the moving-image work primarily through the lens

of transformation and becoming.

As ‘snapshots’ the individual photographic frames elicit the singular moment as well as a

single subject. Through animation, Cerniello creates a new reality and a new subject. This paper

aims to negotiate the continuous transformation of one family member’s photographic image

into another. In what way does this visualization produce a representation of the potential to

become any number of other subjects? Danielle, whether intentionally or not, echoes the radical

change in spatial and temporal experience through digitally generated images of the body.

Continuing an investigation of surveillance, facial recognition and identification, my

overarching research explores the cultural phenomenon of biometrics and reactions to the

technology, privileging artworks as examples. It is my intention to examine artworks that explore

the ways in which the face is being coded for surveying, classifying and categorizing information

about the private person, and that discover means of resisting or questioning biometric control.

In taking up Cerniello’s Danielle, this paper will not only engage with questions of subjectivity

1 Most reviews of Cerniello’s Danielle discuss the process of aging as central to the work. See: David Haglund, “Some Day Hollywood Aging Effects Will Be This Good,” Slate, 13 Sept. 2013, Slate.com, Web, 7 April 2015. Ron Dicker, “Anthony Cerniello’s Aging Simulation Video Will Mesmerize You,” Huffington Post, 11 Sept. 2013, Huffingtonpost.com, Web, 7 April 2015. Carol Kuruvilla, “Stunning Time-lapse Video Shows Young Girl Aging into Elderly Woman,” Daily News New York, 13 Sept. 2013, Nydailynews.com, Web, 7 April 2015.

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and representations of the face within the animated work, but the effect of multiple subjects

merging/morphing to create an illusion of a singular transforming entity. In what ways might this

work be understood to undermine and complicate technologically driven modes of recognition

and identification?

Mirroring the actual genealogy that exists within the work, this paper engages the

genealogy of animation as methodology, examining the qualities of the photographs-turned-

animation and their multiple/singular subject. The ‘still’ photograph can be understood as a

single frame that exists within both cinematography and animation. At the same time the still is

the in-between, fluctuating between animate and inanimate, motion and non-motion. In this way,

locating Danielle within the genealogy of animation allows for an examination of the innovations

necessary to create both a realistic and strange representation of becoming.

GENEALOGY OF ANIMATION

In "Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image,” film and media theorist Lev

Manovich provides a historical analysis and genealogy for my object of study as an animation.

Following Manovich, computer media not only provides cinema new narrative potentialities

(such as the interactive narrative), but “redefine[s] the very identity of cinema.” (293) This

“’crisis’ of cinema’s identity” (294) requires a re-examining of cinema’s past, its features,

innovations and process. While the original characteristic of cinema was narrative and story-

telling, the development of photorealistic computer animation and digital compositing has led to

“computerized” 20th and 21st Century cinema. (“Digital Cinema” 294)

Emerging out of the desire for naturalism or realism, cinema’s foundation is indexical,

photographic, and lens-based. The goal of cinema was to record already-existing reality (live-

action) and erase the traces of production. (298) Understood from the perspective of the ‘art of

motion’ and the illusion of reality, cinema appealed to the obsession with movement and

animation, recording the human body in motion and looping sequences of action. (297) In this

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way, cinema “stressed the aura of reality ‘captured’ on film, thus implying that cinema was about

photographing what existed before the camera rather than creating the ‘never-was’ of special

effects.” (299) On the other hand, animation has an artificial quality, foregrounding its graphic

nature and embracing the ‘never-was.’ As a result of the digital age Manovich argues, cinema

has been affected as a whole, removing the need for a lens, losing its indexicality and becoming

less discernable from animation. Digital filmmaking generates a sense of plasticity previously

achievable only in animation, resulting in “a new kind of realism […] which looks exactly as if it

could have happened, although it really could not.” (301) If contemporary cinema requires no

film, camera or lens, where is the ‘aura of reality’ located in digital cinema?

Contemporary computer graphics provide insight into the myriad ways that animation is

being applied to moving-image works. Similarly, methods of editing, sampling, and stitching

leads to combinations of hand-drawn, computer-based, photographic and cinematic techniques,

blurring the delineation of moving-image production. Due to its ubiquity, it becomes challenging

to separate animation from other moving-image media and practices. Following this argument,

advancements in digital-image manipulation can be considered the return to the ‘pro-cinematic

practices’ of hand-animation. As Manovich states: “Although marginalized by the twentieth-

century institution of live-action, narrative cinema […], these techniques are reemerging as the

foundation of digital filmmaking.” (“Digital Cinema” 308) Therefore, while early forms of manual

animation were trumped by the live-action animation of lens-based images, Manovich exposes

the return of animation as the new groundwork of digital cinema. (302) Moving-image history

thus comes full circle.

FINDING DANIELLE

No stranger to moving-image practices, commercial and film editor Anthony Cerniello

produces commercials for clients such as San Diego Zoo, Rampage and UGG Australia, music

videos for artists Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bright Eyes and Kings of Leon, as well as editing for short

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films with director Patrick Daughters (In Life We Soar; Unloved). My object of study, Danielle

(2013), is a five-minute single channel digitally enhanced animation video by Cerniello, in

collaboration with animators and artists Keith Sirchio, Nathan Meier, Edmund Earle and George

Cuddy.

While Danielle has been widely circulated across the internet, I viewed the animation in

Biometric, an exhibition at the New Media Gallery (New Westminster, BC) that explored the

meeting point between portraiture and biometric-centered science and technologies.

(“Biometrics: New Media Portraits”) Presented on a 65-inch wall-mounted Christie monitor,

Danielle immediately drew my attention as the face(s) fluidly transformed in front of a stark white

seamless background. In a recent email correspondence, New Media Gallery curator Sarah

Joyce noted the decision to show Danielle on a monitor was based on conversations with the

artist and how the exhibition was taking shape. Biometric centered on the tension between the

portrait as a genre and its sterile, technological augmentation. The monitor also provided what

Joyce referred to as “its own intimate space and little zone of focus,” within the clinical white-lit

gallery. Benches were positioned for visitors to contemplate the work, though as Joyce

observed (and I experienced) viewers tended to gravitate to the screen, standing close in an

attempt to perhaps better grasp what is at once an attractive and uneasy work.

The animation begins with almost imperceptible transformations, producing an uncanny

sensation. I stood close and watched Danielle. The first few viewings my eyes were fixed on the

screen, in an effort to witness the moment of change from child to young girl to young woman to

matriarch. The illusion of liveness – as opposed to a static photographic representation – is

carried by the subtle movements of the facial features: the mouth quivers as though to speak;

the eyes blink, gazing back; cheeks flutter, eyebrows perk, chins tremble and throats swallow. I

left with the desire to know how this subject – the animated Danielle – could possibly exist.

In the fall of 2012 Cerniello, with photographer Keith Sirchio, attended Danielle’s family

reunion. Using a Hasselblad medium format camera, Sirchio photographed members of

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Danielle’s family, from her youngest cousins to her oldest relatives. (Jobson np) The

photographs were scanned and edited to include only those family members with the most

similar facial structure and features, then animated by Nathan Meier and Edmund Earle using

After Effects and 3D Studio Max. In order to bring the still

photographs back to life and generate the illusion of a

singular subject captured in a time lapse video, artist

George Cuddy used 3D visual effects software Nuke to

include details such as blinking to the animation. (Jobson)

Cerniello described Danielle as the product of a desire to

“make a person,” to fabricate a narrative embedded in a

life’s trajectory from young to old. (Cerniello, qtd in Jobson

np.) In this way, Danielle can be understood as a construct,

a person that both does and does not exist within the

animation. This concept will be further explored through an

investigation of subject and facial recognition later in this

paper.

When viewed as a series of screenshots

transformations are more apparent, the subject appearing

to grow, taking up more space on the screen (fig.1).

Similarly, the screenshots also reveal the original ‘snapshot’

structure of the work and expose greater differences

between subjects later overcoded by the animation. The

transformation produced by the morphing face(s) echoes

long-term portrait projects such as Noah Kalina’s Everyday Fig. 1. Screenshots from Cerniello’s Danielle, 0:10-1:50. Cerniello, Anthony. Danielle 2013. Anthonycerniello.com. Anthony Cerniello, 8 Sept. 2013. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.

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(2000-2012)2 that configured twelve years of self-portraits into an 8-minute video composite, or

Diego Goldberg’s The Arrow of Time (1976-2014)3 that documents annually each member of his

family in an ongoing ritual. These works specifically engage with aging by documenting and

recording imperceptible changes that accumulate over the years, requiring the passage of real

time. Danielle, by comparison, artificially produces the passage of time, merging multiple

singular subjects (the various family members) into an animation that tricks the viewer into

believing they are witnessing a time-lapse video.

In cinematic terms, the reproduction of movement functions as a selection of equidistant

instants to create an impression of continuity. Taking up Henri Bergson’s second thesis of

movement – the any-instant-whatever – Deleuze frames the lineage of cinema within the

snapshot transformed by the sequential organization of a whole. (“Theses on Movement” 4) He

references Muybridge’s galloping horse (5) that allows the viewer to witness singular points of

movement, not dissimilar to the original ‘snapshots’ of Danielle and the screenshots illustrated in

figure 1. Deleuze notes that the any-instant-whatever could generate a new awareness of

cinema as ‘the organ for perfecting the new reality.’ (8) The creation of a new reality includes

the creation of a new subject - Danielle - who exists only within the animation. In this way,

Danielle can be interpreted as side-stepping the dialogue of aging, engaging instead a

discourse of transformation and becoming, a decidedly less anxious and more unexpected

viewing experience. This subsiding of anxiety can perhaps be attributed to the spectacle of

technology – the use of compositing software to create the illusion of a singular subject – or by

contrast the recognition of the various subjects that can be identified to have been merged

together through visual similarities. Let us first examine the use and attraction of software in

Danielle.

2 Noah Kalina, “Everyday.” Blog.noahkalina.com. Noah Kalina, nd. Web. 3 Mar. 2015. 3 Diego Goldberg, “The Arrow of Time.” Zonezero.com. Zone Zero, 17 Jun. 2014. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.

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SOFTWARE AS ATTRACTION

The compositing tool Nuke, by software developers The Foundry, combines powerful

node-based VFX, editorial and finishing in a program designed to empower creative individuals

and collaborative teams alike. (“Nuke”) While Nuke has roots in high-end feature films, it is

being used in short-form, episodic television, design, marketing and advertising. (“The new

Nuke Range”) Nuke is an open-source, highly customizable range of software that provides

high levels of workflow through speed, flexibility, scalability, and collaboration. The software

allows for access to camera tracking, geometry-building, particle system and lighting, promoting

collaborative VFX production. (“The new Nuke Range”) In its production, Danielle combines

scanning, modeling and rendering, compositing and VFX software. Following the advancements

of digital media and open-source software, the creation, distribution and modifying of software in

the 21st Century engenders social activity. Though credited with creating Danielle, Cerniello

collaborated with several other artists with the skills needed to bring the work to fruition. As

such, Danielle exemplifies what Manovich describes as the social activity of software,

(“Software” 79) forming a universal language and new dimension of culture. Taking up Marshall

McLuhan’s thesis, “the medium is the message,” Manovich describes our current “culture of

software” as the main new media of contemporary society, replacing various technologies

previously required to communicate, create, house and access cultural artifacts. (79) In this

way, software – when added to culture – has the ability to change, adjust and shape cultural

identity and can be considered the perfect example of McLuhan’s “message” of the medium. In

the case of photography, the once-fixed image can be scanned, manipulated, and potentially

animated. Considering Danielle was created using still photographs animated using multiple

software platforms, Manovich’s contemporized McLuhanesque thesis provides an argument

relevant to the analysis of software as a new approach to cultural artifacts. Similarly, the special

effects made possible by Nuke speaks to the attraction of cutting-edge software, making way for

even more spectacular visual experiences.

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In his seminal 1989 essay “An Aesthetics of Astonishment: Early Cinema and the

(In)Credulous Spectator,” cinema and media scholar Tom Gunning describes the alarming first

experience of moving images, one which claims to have terrified audiences by its uncanny

realism. According to Gunning, this legendary response demonstrates the illusory power of

cinema, setting in motion the theory of spectatorship that would come to dominate film studies.

(57) Approaching the spectator from a historical perspective, Gunning investigates the attraction

of new inventions and the role of illusion in cinematic experience, the impact of projected

movement and visual transformation from the trompe l’oeil genre to the uncanny qualities of

recording the real. According to Gunning, early films express the essential element of

attractions, through the excitement of technological curiosities, the exaggeration of experience

and the highlighting of display. (57) Though the illusion of cinema was and is successful, it is

nonetheless understood as illusion. In this way the spectator, not duped into believing that what

they are seeing is ‘real,’ is nevertheless attracted to the spectacle of the experience. Though

analyzed as an animation, Danielle takes up Gunning’s cinema of attractions in its use of new

technologies and software to create the effect of a singular aging subject.

This “attraction” recalls Kracauer’s Mass Ornament in which he describes the alienation

of modern experience, the technologizing of everyday life, and the radical changes in the

experience of space and time. In examining the ornamentation of modernity Kracauer refers to

the spectacle created by popular and internationally renowned female dance ensemble the Tiller

Girls as a “distraction factory,” (75) that works to appease the masses, diverting attention away

from meaning-making and the drive for individualization. (76) The mass movements of the Tiller

Girls’ bodies generates the illusion of a singular organism, working in perfect unison. Danielle

implements an ornamentation of transforming face(s), creating the impression of such a singular

‘organism’. Live action has given way to special effects to generate a more efficient, well-oiled

machine that can out-perform the real. Taking up Manovich, Gunning and Kracauer provides a

historical foundation for the attraction/spectacle of software and contemporary animation, as

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well as the dual attraction to and repulsion of technologically generated subjectivity. In this way,

Danielle puts forward a contemporary spectacle of the digitally mediated subject.

SEEING FACES

As shown, the contemporary spectator continues to be swayed by distracting spectacles:

though aware of the illusions made more possible and more distracting by technology, Danielle

engages the viewer in the spectacle of seamless, sur-real transformation. In observing Danielle

closely, it becomes apparent that the question is not what we see but rather who. Is it the willing

suspension of disbelief that creates the experience of a single subject, or is there another

device to decipher? To better understand how we see faces, I turn first to the psychology of

face-perception and the neurological (in/dis)ability to cognize the face, its features and

proportions.

One of the most rapidly growing areas of research within cognitive science, human face

processing has been a topic of increasing interest to behavioural, neuropsychological and

neuroimaging studies in the last 50 years. To this end, psychologist Dr. Davide Rivolta

demonstrates via a series of standard neurological experiments the ability and depth of

processing involved in face cognition. The process of recognizing objects and faces is mediated

by visual stimuli known as “featural mechanisms,” which visually cognizes and combines

various features (ie: eyes, nose, and mouth). (20) Humans have evolved, gaining the ability to

perceive a face through “holistic processing” (20) that can identify the whole face among other

objects and images within a space of 100 milliseconds. (33) The Bruce and Young model of

face recognition stipulates that facial recognition occurs in multiple stages, from the initial stage

of holistic and featural processing, to the response to specific familiar faces, followed by

semantic information and name retrieval. (27) But how well can we recognize the difference

between faces that are both holistically and featurally similar? Does Danielle really do the trick?

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In their essay “Visual Adaptation and Face Perception,” Drs. Michael Webster and

Donald MacLeod note that the way in which we see a face is affected by the characteristics of

the previous face viewed. (1702) Judgements of identity, expression and similarity are encoded

in the visual system and is based on what the authors refer to as the ‘diet of faces.’ (1702) The

“Jane task,” for example, tests the holistic process by artificially modifying the shape or spacing

of facial features, challenging participants to determine whether two consecutive faces are the

same. (Rivolta 23) While this and other tests might prove that facial recognition falters when

features change, or when viewed with other (dis)similar faces, it places an overbearing focus on

judgements of similarity rather than the actual cognition of a face (and therefore the subject).

Similarly, the determinism of facial cognition locates an ‘average’ or ‘normal’ face against which

all others are considered to deviate. The act of averaging faces refutes differences, changes

and transformations that occur in the space of a life. As Danielle includes several different

faces/subjects morphing consecutively to form an imaginary subject, one could argue that

attempting to locate ‘normal’ diminishes the strangeness and appeal of the animation and

avoids engaging in a critique of how we see faces. In this way, the neuropsychology of facial

recognition – while an interesting avenue to explore – leaves out subjectivity and its discourse of

transformation and becoming.

As a portrait (of a person ‘made’ by Cerniello), Danielle engages questions of subjectivity

and representation, taking the viewer to the edge of recognition, identification and the digitally

manufactured subject. From this position, who am I as a subject and who is Danielle? As the

curators of Biometric state: “The portrait has long been a representation, a reflection, a human

map; a testament to an individual’s existence, a mark in time.” (“Biometrics: New Media

Portraits”) Danielle complicates the representation of an individual existence, highlighting the

way in which we adapt, transform and become throughout a life. Biometric, as both thematic

component and title of the exhibition in which Danielle was curated, engages a field that “seems

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at times to run closely parallel to portraiture, for it is an attempt to describe, quantify and record

the precise measure of a human being.” (“Biometrics: New Media Portraits.”) The drive to ‘know

faces’ through biometric qualifications questions whether technology can better identify faces

than humans and addresses ways of seeing shaped by social, cultural and historical forces. As

a result of the rising culture of surveillance, various sites of our bodies have become

commoditized, denying multiplicity of meaning and dynamism. In this way, facial biometrics and

recognition technology treat the face as a static representation of identity.

Identifying biometrics within the discourse of ‘failure,’ Shoshanna Magnet traces the

various uses and misuses of biometric data collected off the face, stating “real-world

deployment of biometric technologies depends upon practices of inscription, reading, and

interpretation that are assumed to be transparent and self-evident and yet remain complex,

ambiguous, and, as a result, inherently problematic.” (Magnet 3) The biometric imperative is to

engender the body as a ‘thing’ (4) that exists outside of culture, flexibility and fluidity. Stemming

from a long history of documenting and analysing the face as a visible representation of

character and personality, contemporary facial recognition software continues to draw from

scientific methods of information-gathering to support its claim that the face, isolated in a

photographic representation, can give away the truth.

But if the face is an unfixed self-representation, fluid in its motions and characteristics,

what is this fundamental truth? Danielle as an artwork brings this question to the forefront,

generating a fluid body that points to the variability of a perceived ‘singular’ identity and in doing

so questions the potential for positive (ie: correct) biometric identification. With so many faces,

then, which one is the ‘real’ Danielle? Is there a Danielle?

DELEUZIAN FACES

To work through the multiple facial layers within the work, this paper will take up the

many potentialities within Deleuzian analyses of the face: the deterritorialization of the

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importance of a face; the qualities of Peircean firstness and secondness; the whole subject who

is elsewhere, forming a ceaseless becoming; and the immanence of a life that exists as multiple

virtual subjectivities. The face is explored in multiple ways throughout the works of philosophers

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In “Year Zero: Faciality,” they examine the face as the

convergence of sign and subjectivity, resulting in a facial zone that becomes redundant and

loses meaning. As an overcoded external consideration to the body, the human face becomes

excluded or an addition to our concept of the body resulting in what Deleuze and Guattari refer

to as ‘facialization:’

“The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimentional polyvocal corporeal code – when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call the Face. (170)

To decipher these codes is to recognize the way in which representations of ‘faces’

appear in various locations/surfaces, in this case through digital manipulation. Similar to the way

in which biometrics ‘maps’ the face for identification, what Deleuze and Guattari suggest is that

the face is always put forward as a surface of nodes to be coded and categorized. The close-up

image of the face(s) in Danielle separate the head from the body as it transforms externally from

the original subject photographed, becoming another surface, another subject, another face.

According to film and cultural theorist Amy Herzog, the reference to faciality “questions the

notion of a coherent subject, […] let alone the implication that one’s face might transparently

signify some truth about interior psychic states,” and “invoke[s] a long history of fascination with

the physiognomy of the close-up in film theory.” (Herzog 63- 64) In this way, Danielle is an

incoherent subject whose truth is to confound the viewer’s experience of subjectivity, and the

condition for a consistent, singular identity.

As a digital animation of still photographs, the face(s) in Danielle interpreted through the

lens of faciality become reorganized to suggest a single subject, overcoding the multiple

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singularities of each frame. At the same time, or alternatively, the faciality of Danielle can be

found in the superficiality of the special effects that overcode the original snapshots. As Deleuze

and Guattari note, faces are not individual but rather “they define zones of frequency or

probability.” (“Year Zero” 168) In taking up the similar faces of a family genealogy, Cerniello de-

individualizes the subjects embedded in the work replacing them with frequencies of features

and a zone of familiarity/familiality. As faces transform from one to the next, the Danielle that

exists somewhere within the animation becomes overcoded, deterritorialized by Danielle as a

single constructed entity.

CLOSE-UP

Watching the animation, it is challenging – if not impossible – to tell where one subject

ends and another begins. The subtlety of the transformations and the micro-movements of the

eyes, mouth, cheeks and chin create the impression of a living entity, becoming an old woman.

In the 6th chapter of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image Deleuze takes up the close-up face in

cinema, describing the oscillation between the reflective and intensive face. In comparing

qualities, Deleuze draws on the dual possibility of the face represented either as a unified

surface or an expression on the face’s surface (as a collection of independent micro-

movements). (“The Affection Image” 88) The surface of the face, as in Deleuze’s concept of the

close-up face, expresses the passage of Bergsonian affection (87) and might be said to mimic

cinema and animation. With the close-up face, typical capacities to express, socialize, identify,

and communicate dissolve. The face becomes immobilized yet animated with potentialities, and

can point to new connections or assemblages that might bring to life previously unknown

representations of the face and subject. (Herzog 66)

In the case of Danielle, the changing face of the single, manufactured subject can be

understood as an intensive face, transforming over time, with micro facial expressions and

movements. This becomes the representation of a previously unknown subject, brought to life

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through animation and special effects. The constructed subject that does not exist outside the

‘cinematic’ space. Alternatively, if the work is considered to comprise multiple subjectivities, the

intensive face(s) could be understood as contained within the outline of the reflective face, a

placeholder in which the face of Danielle might (at one unknown moment) appear like a

phantom4.

In describing the face as affection-image, Deleuze takes up C.S. Peirce’s classification

of images and signs into ‘firstness,’ ‘secondness’ (“The Affection Image” 98). The affection-

image is categorized as ‘firstness’ as it relates to possibility prior to actualization, sensation and

feeling: “it gives a proper consistency to the possible, it expresses the possible without

actualising it” (98) Secondness on the other hand is the ‘real’ of actualization, a closing down of

possibility into one outcome. Danielle can be considered as ‘firstness,’ if we take into

consideration the variability and changing surface of the face, as well as the space each subject

takes up. According to Peirce, firstness “is that rare faculty […] of seeing what stares one in the

face […] unreplaced by any interpretation.” (Peirce 147) The impossibility of deciphering where

one subject ends and another begins lends the singular manufactured subject of Danielle the

impression of always-becoming that seems to therefore locate itself within firstness.

Secondness on the other hand “is a resolute discrimination which fastens itself […] upon the

particular feature that we are studying […] and detects it beneath all its disguises.” (147) The

struggle to locate the ‘real’ within Danielle, to uncover the trick of special effects and the

disguise created by the one single subject, is therefore secondness, supplied by the viewer. In

this way, the qualities of firstness and secondness echo the multiple possibilities prior to the

feeling, sensation and affection of the self.

4 Deleuze describes the close-up face as ‘phantasmal’ in that it has abandoned the three roles of recognisability: individuating, socialising and communicating. (“The Affection Image” 99)

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ONE OR THE OTHER PERSON

The oscillation between self and other, Danielle and viewer, generates an experience of

the face as a potential encounter with something unrecognizable. In their essay “Losing Face,”

English and literary scholar Dr. Gregory Flaxman, with film and literary theorist Dr. Elena Oxman,

explore the various recurrent concepts of the face put forward by Deleuze and Guattari. The

potential of the indistinguishable face leads to its disappearance, “[becoming] the non-place of an

encounter between the subject and an asubjective becoming, between faciality and its

effacement, between thinking and an unthought.” (Flaxman and Oxman 40) The most salient

aspect of Flaxman and Oxman’s essay is the discussion of the “Other Person” which designates

only one place among multiple positions that can generate a plurality of subjects. (41) From this

position Deleuze and Guattari question to whom an Other Person is actually other. According to

Flaxman and Oxman, “this field of indeterminacy already suggests the contours of another

problem […]: what if instead of asking which comes first, self or other person, we inquire into the

nature of the positions that define self and Other Person, or even subject and object?” (41)

Determining in this way that the Other Person has the potential to occupy a plurality of positions,

Deleuze and Guattari note that “the Other Person appears […] as something that is very different:

a possible world, the possibility of a frightening world. This possible world is not real, or not yet,

but it exists nonetheless” (qtd. In Flaxman and Oxman 42) As it relates to animation, the

expression of the Other Person implicates the possible world of experience, not yet real but

existing nevertheless within the reality created by the moving-image illusion. Danielle as having

multiple subjects could be explored through this theoretical position, challenging the singularity of

the other in relation to the viewer, observing manufactured ‘single’ subject Danielle. The ‘no one’

which appears in Danielle points to a ‘frightening’ world in which transformations take place at a

rapid pace, never allowing one possibility take priority over any other. At the same time, the

multiple potentialities presented in the face(s) of Danielle signal endless possibilities – the many

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positions from which we might experience life, self, becoming, other. Each/all can perhaps be

understood as virtual subjects engaged in the process of actualization within the animation.

The potentialities, subjectivities and transformations within Danielle all contribute to the

illusion of liveness and movement that ‘make’ the animation. Borrowing from Bergson’s third

thesis of movement, Danielle engages the capacity to express change of duration or the whole.

(“Theses on Movement” 8) Duration and movement, by definition, are in a perpetual state of

change and points to a ‘whole,’ elsewhere, which is open and changing. The ‘whole’ according

to Deleuze is defined by its relations that are external to it and is in a state of ceaseless

becoming: “through movement the whole is divided up into objects, and objects are re-united in

the whole, and indeed between the two ‘the whole’ changes.” (11) Danielle forms a ceaseless

becoming, a constant transformation of one family member’s photographic image into another,

each relating to all the rest whether sequentially or otherwise. The ‘whole’ that is elsewhere is a

fictitious subject that has the potential to become any number of other subjects, and might even

point to life itself, which traverses the individual faces while exceeding them. (Marks) The

complexity of Danielle stems from the inability to decide between the hegemony of the singular

fabricated Danielle, or the between-moments that create the perception of a singular person,

while also containing multiple potential singularities. (“Pure Immanence” 30-31)

CONCLUSION

The many faces of Danielle remain full of possibilities – for analysis, exploration,

interpretation and identification. Initially captivated by the visualization of aging that

overshadows Danielle, throughout this paper it has been my goal to allow room for the subjects

to come into view, adapt and transform, mimicking the process of becoming that I have argued

is inherent in the animated work. Danielle calls upon the viewer to come face-to-face with the

illusion of a rapidly changing subjectivity, an experience not unlike the surging flow of time and

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the transformation of life itself. A genealogical representation, Danielle has the potential to

become any number of subjects, and from this position replaces the anxious discourse of aging

with possibilities for personal growth, or metamorphosis. Who I am not now I may become later.

The extraordinary illusion of transformation speaks to the evolution of digitally generated

images, the replacement of the real with new capacities of animation software. Taken in by the

attractiveness of the morphing face(s) the viewer is absorbed by the illusion while

simultaneously acknowledging its deception. Aided by the slight movements and shifts in the

faces themselves, the uncanny quality of liveness created by the animation eclipses its fiction.

This new subject can only exist within the space of the digitally manufactured ‘portrait’,

questioning representations of the face, the veracity of identification and the visual deception of

animation. As a result, the viewer can no longer trust the presentation and perception of a real

subject. In the discourse of facial identification and biometric technologies, Danielle challenges

the capacity to truly know any face.

The theoretical approaches taken up in this paper, though by no means exhausted, have

provided various modes of understanding the many transformations and subjectivities of

Danielle, as well as the way in which we recognize faces. From the multiple individuals

photographed to the single life of Danielle, the close-up face(s) slip in and out of potentialities.

One moment a surface waiting to carry an expression, the next a whole subject with the

possibility to change into any other. Who might Danielle become next?

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Biometrics: New Media Portraits.” Biometric. New Westminster: New Media Gallery, 2015. Web. 7 April 2015. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Affection-Image: Face and Close-up.” Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 87-101. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. “Theses on Movement: First Commentary on Bergson.” Cinema 1: the Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986. 1-11. Deleuze, Gilles, and Anne Boyman. "Immanence: A Life." Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone, 2001. 25-31. Print. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Year Zero: Faciality.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 167-191. Print. Flaxman, Gregory, Elena Oxman. "Losing Face." Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema. Ed. Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack. London: Continuum International, 2008. 39-51. Print. Gunning, Tom. "An Aesthetics of Astonishment: Early Cinema and the (In)Credulous Spectator." Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Volume 3. Ed. Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and Karen J. Shepherdson. London: Routledge, 2004. 78-97. Print. Herzog, Amy. "Suspended Gestures: Schizoanalysis, Affect and the Face in Cinema." Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema. Eds. Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack. London: Continuum International, 2008. 63-74. Print. Jobson, Christopher. “Timelapse of the Imperceptible Effects of Aging Created from Family Portraits by Anthony Cerniello.” Colossal. (September 2013): n. pag. Web. 7 April 2015. Joyce, Sarah. “Re: Anthony Cerniello’s ‘Danielle’.” Message to Kristina Fiedrich. 19 Apr. 2015. E-mail. Kracauer, Siegfried, and Thomas Y. Levin. "The Mass Ornament." The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1995. 75-88. Print. Magnet, Soshana A. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Print. Manovich, Lev. "Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image." The Language of New Media. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2001. 293-307. ---. “Software is the Message.” Journal of Visual Culture 13.1 (2014: 79-81. Sage. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.

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Marks, Laura U. Assignment Notes. FPA 824: New Approaches to Moving-Images Studies, Annotated Bibliography, Simon Fraser University. Vancouver. 9 Mar. 2015. “Nuke.” The Foundry. The Foundry, nd. Web. 12 April 2015. Peirce, C.S. “On Phenomenology (Lecture II).” Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893-1913). Ed. The Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. 145-159. Rivolta, Davide. "Cognitive and Neural Aspects of Face Processing." Prosopagnosia: When All Faces Look the Same. Berlin: Springer, 2014. 19-40. Print. "The new Nuke Range: NUKE 9." Vimeo. Vimeo, 20 October 2014. Web. 12 April 2015.

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