(2022) Faces in disguise. Masks, concealment, and deceit (original) (raw)
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‘Anything but the face’: The mask as strength and vulnerability in disguise and identity deception
CultHist'13, 2013
In May 2013, the FSB expelled an American diplomat on the grounds that he was spying for the CIA. Listed among the alleged spy’s suspicious possessions were ‘means of altering appearance’. It was later revealed that this disguise kit contained a variety of wigs and sunglasses. These paraphernalia were so ill-fitting that they seemed to belong in a comedy performance, but they provoked some serious debate. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, former CIA operative, Robert Baer, described the thick-rimmed glasses and stick-on moustaches that he and his colleagues had worn to break up facial contours. The aim of these disguises was to make people remember ‘something other than the face’. An individual’s identity is bound up in his or face more so than any other body part. Passport photographs, portraits, and other images related to personal identity, tend to feature the face. It is for this reason that criminal photo-fits tend to feature only the head, and why criminals’ disguises concentrate on concealing the face and head. The problem with any mask or facial disguise is that it immediately marks someone out as a wrong-doer. The mere act of wearing a mask may itself be considered morally questionable, as it is a deception of sorts. The ‘mask has come to connote something disingenuous, something false’. It is overtly a disguise. David Napier observes that it is this sense of an incomplete identity that drives audiences to seek out the secret alternative identity hidden underneath. The mask is ‘known to have no inside’ and this ‘invit[es] the audience to peer behind the mask’. This paper will explore the problem of the mask and its use in disguise. While effective disguise often necessitates the use of a mask (or other artefacts that distort or conceal the face), facial disguises often heighten the observer’s sense of curiosity about the identity beneath. Taking recent and historical examples of physical disguise, the paper will identify why the mask is the cornerstone of disguise, and simultaneously the disguise’s greatest point of vulnerability.
Elusive Masks: A Semiotic Approach of Contemporary Acts of Masking
Lexia. Revista di Semiotica, 2021
Elusive masks made by artists, designers, and creative citizens are more and more worn during urban protests in order to elude facial recognition software used for mass surveillance programs. The present article discusses some of the semiotic functioning of elusive masks, starting from a exploration of the concept of 'mask' and its ritualistic collective functions maintained in contemporaneity. This will allow to analysed some cases studies according to the first Peircean trichotomy, that of the sign in itself, with the aim of understanding how masks respond to facial recognition systems in urban contexts. The correlation between the natural and the artificial face is also considered, paying particular attention to the transformations originated by these masks, as an expression of resistance tactics against such computational surveillance tactics.
"Strategic Madness: Disguise as Motif and Method"
The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, 2022
This paper examines selected instances of disguise as a literary motif and as a literary strategy in English writing of the early modern period. The aim is to illuminate the nexus between shifting social, political, and religious faultlines on the one hand and varying forms of dissimulation on the other, and to document that from the Tudor period onwards, English literature tends to manifest at least as much self-effacing as self-fashioning. It is further argued that this literary self-effacing and self- fashioning were two sides of the same coin, and that seen in their historical context, they appear as opposite poles of a paradoxical dialectic that was at the same time symptomatic and diagnostic. Examples cited range from English adaptations of Petrarchan poetic conventions to various forms of deceit, disguise, camouflage, and concealment in Tudor and Jacobean drama.
International Philosophical Quarterly, 2010
By showing how the person appears, this paper calls into question the Cartesian prejudice that restricts appearance to objects. The paper recapitulates the origin of the term “person,” which originally designated the masks and characters donned by actors and only subsequently came to designate each particular human being. By concealing a face, the mask establishes a character who speaks with words of his own. The mask points to the face and to speech as ways the person appears. It belongs to the very nature of the person not only to appear but also to be aware of how one appears, and to have the ability to modulate that appearance as the situation requires. This ability means one thing in art and another in life, and the paper explores the significance of this contrast
Concealment of the face and new physiognomies
De Gruyter, 2023
Facial recognition technology has enabled governments and private companies to have control of millions of faces in different countries around the world. This becomes dangerous since it threatens the privacy of citizens, which is why different activists demonstrate against this form of control and surveillance using different technological and aesthetic resources to prevent said recognition. This work aims at showing how face concealment can be a powerful semiotic device that can slow down or divert facial recognition technology, configuring new physiognomies. We begin by characterizing the forms of concealment of the face in the contemporary digital age, and then we analyze, from a semiotic perspective, a particular case: the different types of makeup that Adam Harvey proposes so that faces cannot be recognized. The results of the investigation show how this form of face concealment that generates new physiognomies builds political senses of resistance against advanced technology that aims to identify, monitor, and control human faces.
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