Ground Truth (n.)

1. The reality of a situation as experienced firsthand by a human rather than by report

2. In statistics and machine learning, ground truth is ‘real world’ data used to verify the performance of algorithms trained using machine learning for accuracy. Ground truth can also be used as a verb to mean verify and calibrate.

Across Eastern and Western cultures, society has developed ways to predict a person's character through facial features. In East Asian cultures, the esoteric practice of face-reading promises the power to see into one's future through facial analysis. Though face reading remains largely a folk belief, many continue to seek the occult power of predictions from face readers. In the West, the forgotten pseudo-science of physiognomy, combined with statistics and machine learning, re-enters our modern lives as facial recognition algorithms, where societal biases and individual prejudices continue perpetuating.

In the project, I put my face through various processes of creating predictions, namely Western physiognomy, face reading, face recognition, facial phenotyping, facial generation, and synthetic facial data. I mix the visual language of the occult in face reading with the 'scientific' in facial recognition in an attempt to blur the line between practices from the East and the West. The visual study reveals the similarities between two predictive regimes centered around the face: one remains folklore, while the other is extensively applied to almost every aspect of our daily life. The project challenges the automation bias of facial recognition (or what I call Western face reading). It unveils the deeper, often-unexamined meta-narratives underlying these practices.

A face is more than just a face. It is an interface of predictions trapped between two analytical frameworks and cosmological views that are not as different as they originally seemed.

Digital Experience by FOAM

The artist would like to thank the Finnish Cultural Foundation for their kind support.