Upon entering the performance space, the audience is greeted by a colossal projection of another facial composite. It is projected onto the aforementioned gauze screen (F01, quoting the Bauhaus’s glazed workshop facade), which is aligned with the thirty-degree rotation of RG02. Because of this rotation, the screen directs the entering audience through a narrowing space, bringing it very near to the projection. Before turning the corner to discover the rest of the stage and the totality of the projected image from the other side of the gauze, they encounter, from up close, the pixels and vertices that constitute the image.
The face slowly rotating on the screen seems intact. Yet it is eerily androgynous. When observing it for a while, one notices that it is subtly yet constantly mutating. The hint of a moustache appears, the eyes seem to be gradually changing colour, one believes one is starting to recognise one of the performers. But the recognition is elusive: A has grown more faint, C slowly reappears – the image is always in-between. The image on the screen is topologically transforming using a script that interpolates between the digitised features of the performers. The colour and position of each vertex is calculated as a weighted average of the three input scans.
Returning to the perspective of our visually literate postmodern audience, this method seems to have more potential to resonate and unsettle, to engage them in their associative tentacles. This is because it has shifted to a different level of operation when compared with the fractured identities of the composite masks: it operates on the level of the vertex, the code rather than the physical boundary. Or to put it differently, it operates on a level of control rather than of discipline.
In his short essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Gilles Deleuze describes the transition from disciplinary societies to what he calls control societies as a shift from the physical enclosures of factories, schools, and hospitals that generated and disciplined the subject from the late eighteenth century onwards towards the more dispersed logics of power emerging in the late twentieth century with the advent of digital technologies and the neoliberal economy. He quotes an architectural example from Guattari to explain this transition: no longer is it a building’s walls and doors that decide whether we are inside or outside, it is the electronic card we carry with us that opens its barriers – the new border being neither this barrier nor the card as such but the computer algorithm that controls whether one’s card opens the barrier. The enclosure has been superseded by a thick, dissolved edge that modulates rather than confines: ‘enclosures’, Deleuze describes in a striking analogy with the development of our masks,
are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point. (1992: 4)
Modulations do not impress an exterior form onto the subject’s body (like the moulding mask on RG02’s stamping seesaw), they permeate and entangle this body as part of a larger machinic assemblage. In societies of control, there is no ‘outside’. Or, to return to Guattari’s description of the dancer in the introduction, the dancer is already ‘a component part of the machine’.
This method of reconstruction echoes the ‘evolutionary’ or ‘holistic’ techniques of forensic facial compositing that have recently superseded feature-based methods like IdentiKit (Wikipedia 2020). We are no longer looking at (a composite of) discreet components with clear cuts between identities; instead, the identities are crossed in their very grain, at the level of their data structure. The disobedience of our method of averaging lies in its unsteadiness. If evolutionary forensic compositing eventually aims to reconstruct the fixed identity of a specific individual,1 our androgynous portrait resists fixity, it is constantly in motion, an ephemeral in-between, a becoming that resonates with the fleeting and composite nature of our contemporary post-digital identities.
