Week 5: The Face and the
public:
Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice
A
lot of new idea for me: I have understood about a face as an identity very
obscurely before reading this article. A face is became a material as
discourses for understanding modern society after the advent of the Internet.
The existence of ‘uncanny
doppelgängers’:
There are many doppelgängers in Korea. It is not related with “Nancy Burson’s Human Race Machine” that is to “move
beyond differences-inequality- and arrive at sameness-equality”. Some of Koreans
envy “The Beauty” and they have several plastic surgeries for transformation of
their faces and bodies. For them, the Beauty is a physical trait as a symbol
for the bright future. There is a kind of substantiated ‘passing’ in offline. Their intention that is to “move beyond the
ordinary and arrive at the beauty” is different with Burson’s, yet the result
is the same of her work. They could transform through the plastic surgery- the
certain technology- in their physical traits, however, their face become like
any other face, any whatever face. By
Agamben, “Be only your face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subject of
your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them; rather, go with them,
in them, beyond them”.
