Here's an idea.
The terrifying nature of face swaps
gives us insight into what it's like to be a computer.
[THEME MUSIC]
A couple weeks ago, I was lucky enough
to hang out with WheezyWaiter when he was visiting New York.
He said, before we part ways, you have to be in today's vlog.
I'm not gonna tell you why, but it's going to be really good.
He set up his camera.
And then this happened.
Hi, I'm Mike Rugnetta.
Hey.
I'm WheezyWaiter.
Like any self-respecting internet professional,
I've swapped faces with some friends.
But this dopple-swap got me really
thinking about the technology surrounding face swapping,
specifically the really bizarre and often hilarious
horror of it.
In case you haven't had the swap pleasure,
face swapping requires a particular kind of software
like Face Swap Live, the app used in the recent face swap
challenge making its way around YouTube,
a Belarusian app called MSQRD, which was just purchased
by Facebook, or Snapchat.
Oh-ho-ho.
In general, face swapping is not new.
Clever meme lords have used a similar Photoshop technique
for years.
/r/faceswap has turned into a sea of Snapchat-like swaps.
But a dip into the archives from 2013
reveals swaps of a much different variety.
I would also argue that sleeveface,
a joke that predates the internet,
is another predecessor to face swapping.
There's a degree to which none of these are about people
but about images of people.
The face becomes available information
adapted to some novel use.
In the way everything printed adopts
the materiality of paper, everything digitized
adopts the materiality of digital objects.
Except digital materiality is complicated.
And faces are, you know, faces.
They're the home of identity, the metonym for one's values,
reputation, and personality.
The use of face to mean one's character
originated in the Chinese language
and is traceable through Japanese and eventually
to many other languages, including English.
In the early '90s, lexicographer Michael Carr
determined that face and countenance words
were semantically extended to 98 common expressions
for prestige, honor, or reputation in Chinese
and 89 in Japanese.
These phrases translate to English
as things like struggling for face,
borrowing face, tearing up face, and having no face.
Carr points out that English has only five such common
expressions-- lose face, save face
both with and without a hyphen, face saving,
and a face saver, which is to say
though we may have fewer expressions for it in English,
there is ample evidence that humans experience the face
as a social and cultural symbol for the physical self,
the metaphysical self, and unity between the two
experienced by both owner and observer.
Lakoff and Johnson call this the face
for the person in their book, "Metaphors We Live By."
They write that it's quote, "not merely a matter of language.
In our culture, we look at a person's face
rather than his posture or his movements
to get our basic information about what the person is like."
This goes well beyond the superficial
and works because, broadly speaking,
faces are unique to their wearer,
easily identifiable, unlike a fingerprint, and fixed.
Barring lasers and a robot vacuum arm, you and your pals
aren't gonna switch faces until, well, this.
What I wonder is if any of this can
help explain a common reaction that people have when they swap
faces or they see their friends swapping faces.
This is the worst thing that ever happened.
This is horrifying.
My god.
The most terrifying--
Wait, wait.
[SHUDDER]
[SCREAM]
[LAUGHTER]
OFFSCREEN FRIEND: That is horrible.
Oh my god.
I look like Ted Cruz.
There really is, I think, an aspect of horror
to all of this, body horror specifically,
an art horror genre with many practitioners
across lots of media but which for many people
is exemplified by the work of director David
Cronenberg in his films like "The Fly," "Scanners,"
"Existenz," and "Videodrome."
Body horror can be but isn't necessarily gruesome.
It is, however, always uncomfortable.
Ooh, that's disgusting.
In his paper, "Mutations and Metamorpheses,"
Ronald Allan Lopez Cruz argues that body horror is, quote,
"characterized by the manipulation
and warping of the normal state of bodily form and function"
and that the fear that's present in body horrific works
is, quote, "not of death but of one's own body
and its potential destruction."
Body horrific destruction isn't necessarily fatal,
but it does transgress the human body's normal function.
This destruction is not always total.
But it is usually structural.
Face swapping, similarly, isn't gruesome,
but it's not not unsettling.
It's a weirdly literal, perhaps horrific, borrowing of face,
all too appropriately powered by the technology that we
use to socialize, to put in face time,
often to build our reputations.
Speaking with City Paper, digital dualism coiner
and Snapchat researcher Nathan Jurgensen
called Cronenberg's "Videodrome" the best movie
about social media.
He says, quote, "it's bodies and humanity being
merged, and meshed, and imploded with technology and media
signal, not separate but mixed and augmented."
There's a degree to which your normal,
run-of-the-mill face swap exemplifies this.
And then there's another kind of face swap which does so doubly,
all while channeling another different and much more vast
kind of horror.
Oh god, what's happening?
Occasionally, the face swap algorithm
may suffer a kind of technological pareidolia, which
is the perception of a familiar pattern of something
where none actually exists.
Technically, it's a psychological phenomenon
where we, people with, you know, psyches
see shapes in clouds, horse heads in nebulas,
Jesus in toast, and of faces in everything.
A combination of our neurological visual processing
equipment memory and imagination assemble randomly
arranged individual shapes into a meaningful gestalt.
Programmatically, this is pretty similar to how
computerized facial recognition works.
Programs are taught and can sometimes learn,
roughly speaking, what shapes and arrangement of those
shapes create a face.
But ultimately, they lack human judgment.
You've probably never worried about the little man trapped
in the surface of your wall, for example.
So they can get fooled, let's say.
Algorithms will sometimes mistake inanimate objects
for the foremost biological expression
of social identity, the face.
In a piece for New York Magazine,
Brian Feldman wagers that these face swaps, which
display a fundamental misunderstanding of what
it means to be human, to possess an identity,
may assuage some of our anxiety about the growing
intelligence of machines.
He writes, "It can be a relief to know that even though code
is just a complex set of step by step instructions,
it's still in some way fallible.
It cannot yet fully approximate human technique
and appearance."
I would argue that the opposite is true.
It's not comforting to know that machines are fallible,
but rather vexing and obscurely terrifying to know what exactly
their algorithms think of us, what they think
about our bodies, the visual construction of our identities.
And what we perceive as a deep and fundamental connection
between those two things, they think
nothing about those things-- nothing at all.
Your face is now a tire rim.
Tire rims are now faces-- whatever.
This insight is not body horrific,
but cosmically horrific, positively Lovecraftian.
In his book, "Weird Realism," philosopher Graham Harman
describes Lovecraft as a writer who
understands the horror of gaps, specifically
the gaps between what things appear to be
and what they truly are.
Characters in Lovecraftian horror
constantly struggle to perceive and describe what they behold.
The truth and the subjects of those
experiences retreats from all manner of human comprehension,
often resulting in or equating with madness.
Similarly, as one of Harman's colleagues
Ian Bogost points out in his book "Alien Phenomenology,"
it's difficult, if not impossible,
to comprehend what it's like to be a thing, a coffee
mug, a government, a mobile phone app.
Why we may or may not want that knowledge
is the subject of some debate.
So I'll put some links in the doobly doo.
But either way, when or if we gain insight
into the experiences of things, we're
confronted with those Lovecraftian gaps.
We may see that there's a mode of experience
completely unlike our own, unlike any sense of the word
experience that we have, and rather impossible to describe.
We're shown the space between reality
as we perceive it and reality in some as it may actually be.
So maybe one reason glitched swaps
are terrifying is that we're shown, just for a moment, what
it's like to be an app, or a program, or an algorithm.
We're given a glimpse, if even a minuscule and metaphoric one,
into the experiences of machine kind,
divorced from and disinterested in all of this human nonsense,
disregarding, and misunderstanding,
or perhaps just plain not caring about the physical parts that
comprise humans, often considered the only agents
or the most important of a very few capable of having
experiences worth considering.
Confronting the experiences of things
that may be horrifying in the way Lovecraft
often is, a horror that's vague and incomprehensible and more
unsettling than it is physically dangerous or gruesome.
With this as our starting point then,
it would make sense that different machines, algorithms,
apps, have different experiences,
see us differently.
So we might look for other insight regarding
the viewership of humanity through the eyes of code
and ask if it too produces some cosmic horror.
I think there is.
And I think that we would be hard pressed
to find an example more fitting than Google's Deep Dream.
Deep Dream was designed to recognize and categorize
photos of faces.
Images run through Deep Dream can
have the patterns which are recognized
in them enhanced and printed back onto the image in a way.
If an image is passed through Deep Dream,
enhanced, and reprinted over and over again,
meaningfulness is not extracted from but brought to that image
by the algorithm.
That meaningfulness is a shaped by Deep Dream's focus, faces.
Photos turn from mundane to hallucinogenic,
often vaguely upsetting collages of human, animal, and fish
faces, all set against a busy, Alex Grey-esque backdrop.
For me, Deep Dream's output sits at the intersection
of body horror, cosmic horror, and cyberpunk dystopia.
It exhibits a misunderstanding, a quote, "total disregard for
and ignorance of the human body,"
as Philip Brophy describes John Carpenter's, "The Thing."
It does so as an effect of its own perspective,
a human-made algorithm obsessed with
faces while simultaneously knowing next to nothing
about them-- or really knowing an impossible
amount but the type of knowledge impossible to comprehend
by anyone with a face.
Deep Dream is an algorithm which uses bodies, images of them,
without the inconvenience of ever needing to have one.
Unlike pareidoliac face swaps, I rarely
laugh at the results of Deep Dream's reiterative process.
I grimace, maybe sweat a little.
Because it's unsettling.
I mean, look at this.
But also because I can imagine, but just barely,
that this is how a computer sees me.
And that's a little horrifying.
This is horrifying.
What do y'all think?
Is there a horror to face swaps?
And how does it relate to body horror or cosmic horror?
Let us know in the comments.
And I will respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding violence
as the removal of choice.
If you want to watch that one, you
can click here or find a link in the doobly doo.
I'm sorry that we have to do it just immediately
after my allergies have set in and I sound
like I have a cotton balls stuck in my nose.
It's not-- it's not fun on the side of the camera either.
Also you might have noticed the brand new Idea Channel
t-shirt that I was wearing for most of this episode.
If you want to check that one out or buy it,
you can go to dftba.com.
Find a link in the doobly doo, or we'll put a card way over
there, because I'm currently in a tiny box.
It's over that way-- yonder.
We're gonna be at VidCon next month.
I'm gonna be moderating two panels, one about the education
space and one about "Doctor Who."
So if you're there, come say hi.
We're probably gonna do some meet-ups.
PBS Digital Studios is gonna have
a chill lounge with all kinds of Idea Channel stuff.
There are gonna be host and creator book shelves.
So you're gonna get to see some books that we chose.
It's gonna be a great time.
Also, speaking of Digital Studios today, so Wednesday--
but then also I guess that means 24 hours from now.
On the Digital Studios Snapchat, which
we'll put the little Snapchat ghosty linky thing,
you know, somewhere around here-- I'm
gonna be giving a tour of the new set
that we have built for Idea Channel, sort of talking
about some of the things that are on the shelves,
talking about some of the books, some
of how it got put together.
And then on Friday of this week, we're
gonna be releasing a video that is a short conversation with me
and my friend James, who designed and built the set,
about the process, how it came together,
how he didn't want me to get rid of record wall
even though I really, really wanted to.
So you can thank him for that.
So a PBS Digital Studios Snapchat tour of the new set
and on Friday, an interview with my friend James.
And then next Friday, we're gonna
be doing a short video that explains
how you can win a post-modernism hat-- one of these.
We have a Facebook, and IRC, and a subreddit-- links
in the doobly doo.
The Tweet of the week comes from MattuD2,
who points us towards a really interesting and somewhat
lengthy panel discussion between some journalists
and some people who are involved in the Occupy Movement
about the legitimate uses of violence
as a tactic for protest.
And it's not only a really interesting conversation
in and of itself, but it's also, I
think, a really great and interesting format
for having people who in some way
fundamentally disagree with one another talk
through their ideas and their disagreements.
And if you don't want to the whole thing, that's great.
But I would suggest at least watching the first seven or so
minutes just for the set-up of the conversation itself.
It's just-- uh, I wish that there were more
things like this in the world.
And last but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these things.
Allergy medicine is making me feel crazy.
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