Faces was a short film created as a backdrop for Hecuba’s performance at the screening of dublab’s Vision Version series. Working with Jon and Isabelle (Hecuba), we considered that the performance and screening was being held at the Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles, so we decided to create a piece to highlight our experience of LA, celebratory but dreamy, filled with chance encounters with friends and acquaintances but soon fading from memory. Memory, we decided, begins to fade with the faces. Faces of people we hardly know, or know so well we think them rather than see them, quickly disappear. We don’t remember the gamut of expressions that moved across our friends’ faces one night. We remember an average, the extremes, how moods changed, and maybe extrapolate from there what the faces must have looked like.
From here it was easy, we needed to remove the faces from the clips of a night out. But just as remembering is faulty and inconsistent, so is forgetting. So using custom software built using face detection algorithms, we blindly processed the video, and replaced all the faces found in the video with the average the color from the surrounding area. The result was imperfect, fractured and unpredictable, somewhat like memory.
