Devon Schiller
University of Vienna, English and American Studies, Department Member
- Algorithms, New Media Art, Facial expression, Biometrics, Physiognomy, Haptics, and 44 moreImage Science, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Art, Multimodality, Phenomenology, Phenomenology of the body, Phenomenology of Temporality, Scientific creativity, Semiotics, Visual Semiotics, Cognitive Semiotics, Biosemiotics, Subjectivity, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Facial Recognition, Mythology And Folklore, Intellectual History, Digital Photography, Augmented Reality, Photography, Digital Media, History Of Emotions, Photography Theory, Museums and Exhibition Design, Art History, Bioethics, Optics, Cultural Semiotics, Erasmus, Socrates, History of Experimentation, Facial Action Coding System (FACS), Darwin, Umberto Eco, Facial Expressions and Emotions, Iconicity, Mirrors, Paul Ekman, The Mirror Stage, Human Face in Science and Art, Human Face, History of Human Face, and Nonverbal Behavioredit
- Devon Schiller is a biological, cognitive, and medical semiotician. His scholarship centers around the semioethics of... moreDevon Schiller is a biological, cognitive, and medical semiotician. His scholarship centers around the semioethics of psychological science. In particular, Schiller’s research focuses on dynamic human facial behavior, its scientific modelling, and semiotic temporalities, in epistemologies of experimentation across contemporary and historical psychology.
Schiller is a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna, studies for which he received a DOC Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He holds a Master of Arts, Advanced in the history of media art from Danube University, Austria, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in art history and studio painting from the Kansas City Art Institute, United States.
Schiller trained in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) at the University of California at Berkeley, United States, and at I&G Management in Milan, Italy, as well as in the Neuropsychological Gesture Coding System (NEUROGES) at the German Sports University Cologne, Germany. And he conducted grant-supported research on automated facial behavior analysis at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, Germany, as well as on the forensic science of facial reconstruction at the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University, United States.edit
Research Interests: Semiotics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Pragmatism, American Philosophy, and 15 moreHistory of Science, Philosophy of Psychology, Biosemiotics, Charles S. Peirce, History Of Psychology, Psychology of Hope, Pragmatism (Philosophy), Facial expression, Peirce Pragmaticist Semiotics, Epistemology of Experimentation, Facial Action Coding System (FACS), Peircean Semiotics, American Pragmatism, Experimentation, and Ekman Paul
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To critically explicate the visual epistemology for catoptric autoexperimentation in the contemporary science of facial behavior, by way of its historical progenitors, I draw upon the pragmatic semiotics of the catoptric phenomenon. This... more
To critically explicate the visual epistemology for catoptric autoexperimentation in the contemporary science of facial behavior, by way of its historical progenitors, I draw upon the pragmatic semiotics of the catoptric phenomenon. This problematization of catoptrics is fundamentally about two different but related concepts: the semiotic threshold and the iconicity debate. Based on primary sources both Western and Eastern, I trace a transcultural history of scientific ideas about performing catoptric auto-experimentation through privileged case studies from physiognomic literary corpora. I probe the ways in which self-recognition has long been pragmatically necessitated as well as processually normative in the study of the face, the research and development of optical technologies has in turn led to paradigm shifts in physiognomic thought, and the procatoptric staging behind the catoptric prosthesis conditions its visual epistemology. I propose that the catoptric prosthesis is not pre-but post-semiotic. That is, the mirror only becomes a mirror when part of a semiotic process and sign relation. The extreme of iconicity that is perceptually afforded by the catoptric prosthesis, far from disqualifying it from the status of a sign, is exactly what distinguishes its role and importance for this semiosis of the face.
Research Interests: Semiotics, Optics, Philosophy of Science, Cultural Semiotics, Visual Semiotics, and 15 moreErasmus, Socrates, History of Experimentation, Facial expression, Facial Action Coding System (FACS), Darwin, Umberto Eco, Facial Expressions and Emotions, Iconicity, Mirrors, Paul Ekman, The Mirror Stage, Human Face, Human Face in Science and Art, and History of Human Face
Paul Ekman is an American psychologist who pioneered the study of facial behaviour. Bringing together disciplinary history, life study, and history of science, this paper focuses on Ekman’s early research during the twenty-year... more
Paul Ekman is an American psychologist who pioneered the study of facial behaviour. Bringing together disciplinary history, life study, and history of science, this paper focuses on Ekman’s early research during the twenty-year period between 1957 and 1978. I explicate the historical development of Ekman’s semiotic model of facial behaviour, tracing the thread of iconicity through his life and works: from the iconic coding of rapid signs; through the eventual turn from classifying modes of iconic signification using gestalt categories to classifying modes of producing iconic sign-functions using minimal units; to the role and importance of iconicity for the study of the facial expression of emotion, both in terms of the similarities between iconic and analogue signs as well as the differences between facial coding and linguistic signification. In this intellectual genealogy, I argue not only that Ekman relied extensively upon conceptualizations and terminologies from semiotic thought for the creation of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), but also that the question of iconicity is the pivotal problem across the many discoveries and innovations in what I term ‘Ekmanian faciasemiotics’.
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Our knowledge about the facial expression of emotion may well be entering an age of scientific revolution. Conceptual models for facial behavior and emotion phenomena appear to be undergoing a paradigm shift brought on at least in part by... more
Our knowledge about the facial expression of emotion may well be entering an age of scientific revolution. Conceptual models for facial behavior and emotion phenomena appear to be undergoing a paradigm shift brought on at least in part by advances made in facial recognition technology and automated facial expression analysis. And the use of technological labor by corporate, government, and institutional agents for extracting data capital from both the static morphology of the face and dynamic movement of the emotions is accelerating. Through a brief survey, the author seeks to introduce what he terms biometric art, a form of new media art on the cutting-edge between this advanced science and technology about the human face. In the last ten years, an increasing number of media artists in countries across the globe have been creating such biometric artworks. And today, awards, exhibitions, and festivals are starting to be dedicated to this new art form. The author explores the making of this biometric art as a critical practice in which artists investigate the roles played by science and technology in society, experimenting, for example, with Basic Emotions Theory, emotion artificial intelligence, and the Facial Action Coding System. Taking a comprehensive view of art, science, and technology, the author surveys the history of design for biometric art that uses facial recognition and emotion recognition, the individuals who create such art and the institutions that support it, as well as how this biometric art is made and what it is about. By so doing, the author contributes to the history, practice, and theory for the facial expression of emotion, sketching an interdisciplinary area of inquiry for further and future research, with relevance to academicians and creatives alike who question how we think about what we feel.
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After the many algorithmic, computational, and digital turns over the last five decades, the ways in which we experience and understand the face as something in and of the environment appear to be fundamentally shifting. Indeed, today... more
After the many algorithmic, computational, and digital turns over the last five decades, the ways in which we experience and understand the face as something in and of the environment appear to be fundamentally shifting. Indeed, today more and more corporations, institutions, and governments are using automated facial recognition systems within smart environments for abstracting data capital from facial behavior. Through a post-digital perspective, the author explores a history of ideas about the face in relation to its environment across the artistic, scientific and technologic imaginaries, both constants from the past and changes of the present. This intellectual historiography compares three sources: English folklorist Julia Somerset’s 1939 article “The ‘Green Man’ in Church Architecture,” German neurologist Joachim Bodamer’s 1947 case history “The Face Blind,” and Japanese computer scientist Takeo Kanade’s 1973 doctoral project “Computer Recognition of Human Faces,” as well as their rhizomatic interrelations. By tracing the role of the environment in the study of the face, the author maps a genealogical landscape of ideas that roams across the absence and presence of color, human perception and mediated vision, inner and outer ways of seeing, as well as nonvisible and visible imaging. And, to possibly reconcile the very real ambiguity of the human face with the digital binarism of our increasingly computational planet, the author proposes a “greening of the face” whereby the face and its environment are conceptually modeled as being concretized within a complementary, reciprocal process of becoming.
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Augmented photography can be used in the digital arts to over-code upon real-world environments with computer-generated data, in order to translate stimuli across sensory modalities, and thereby extent or increase our faculties for... more
Augmented photography can be used in the digital arts to over-code upon real-world environments with computer-generated data, in order to translate stimuli across sensory modalities, and thereby extent or increase our faculties for perceiving spatial and temporal relations. Because of this media-specific affordance, the augmentation of the photographic medium may have especial application for the “physiognomic gaze”, a way of doing “form interpretation” or “nature knowing” based on the physical behaviors and psychological phenomena of the human face, head and body. The innovativeness of such technological prosthetics becomes manifest how new ways are generated to both perceive and to know those experiences that were previously unseeable or otherwise unsensable. Here, I converse with Cedric Kiefer (co-founder and creative lead) of the onformative studio for digital art and design in Germany about their works Meandering River (2017), Pathfinder (2014) and Google Faces (2013). And we explore how onformative uses the augmented photograph in their digital artworks to extend the physiognomic gaze, bringing data not visible to the naked eye into the senseable sphere, to offer the audience different perspectives about space and time.
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With the algorithmic age of computable emotions, an increasing number of digital artists base the form of their Internet or sculptural installation on Automated Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA), and its functionality achieved via the... more
With the algorithmic age of computable emotions, an increasing number of digital artists base the form of their Internet or sculptural installation on Automated Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA), and its functionality achieved via the photographic documentation in face databases. These contemporary artists make visible a digital habit of thought that objectivates the human face into a plastic grotesque of grimacing extremis, and the self inside out into the universal or utilitarian. Yet, most AFEA systems–a term little clarified and much confused with facial recognition or biometrics–are ‘black box’ frameworks. Introduced by the technological industry and scientific experts, such proprietary closed source algorithms veil the majority of program functionality input from available data output, hiding how it works from immediate observation by artist and audience. By problematizing Julius von Bismarck’s Public Face (2008-14) and its intermedial genealogies, I probe the extent to which AFEA represents the face and its expression of emotion from a technostalgic view that reduces scientific complexity, while informing how we think about what we feel today.
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In an era of networked individualism, a prolificacy of online images necessitates of us a visual literacy. In what way do emotions encode the aesthetics of digital media? To what extent does cultural learning influence the social... more
In an era of networked individualism, a prolificacy of online images necessitates of us a visual literacy. In what way do emotions encode the aesthetics of digital media? To what extent does cultural learning influence the social expression of these emotion states? How do our bodies and their interaction with the environment inform how we image the feeling of emotion? Probing the interaction between emotional processes (with which we perceive, engage, and regulate our experience of self) and photo-editing software (through which we frame, appraise, and communicate our imaging for self), Devon Schiller curates renditions of a kiss on the computer desktop that is my canvas. Crafting a multimodal visual inquiry (screenshots and textual witness), Schiller employs cultural analysis informed by the paradigm of mind science to investigate this reciprocity between the internal character of emotion (its biological causality, environmental induction, and inwardly-directed aesthetic re-presentation) and the external exhibition of these activation states (bodily posture, social valuation, and mimetic expression). With neuroimaging and the science of emotion inspiring an evolving art history, Schiller demonstrates how digital art may advance a critical awareness of emotion and its imaging in society.
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Semiotics, History of Science and Technology, Computer Science, Philosophy of Science, and 14 moreResearch Methodology, Qualitative methodology, Qualitative Methods, Cybernetics, Cultural Theory, Science Fiction, Quantitative Methods, Philosophy of Computer Science, Science and Technology, Second-Order Cybernetics, science and technology studies (STS), Cybersemiotics, Theory of Everything, and Science and Technology Studies
The call for a biosemiotic perspective within medical semiotics has been steadily increasing over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective, Yogi Hale Hendlin, Johnathan Hope, and... more
The call for a biosemiotic perspective within medical semiotics has been steadily increasing over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective, Yogi Hale Hendlin, Johnathan Hope, and the nine contributions in their edited volume boldly seek to bridge the segregation between nature and culture in the medical sciences as well as in the medical humanities. To a large extent, they achieve this aim by explicating the sign relations in food and medicine, the sign relations of medical theory and practice, and the sign relations between the biology in medicine and medicine of society. Taking up a semio-historical approach, I contextualize two select contributions from Hendlin and Hope's Food and Medicine with the medical semiotics of the Hippocratic tradition. By comparing the biological semiotics from the contributions to the medical semiotics from the Corpus, I critically explicate the ways in which biosemiotics moves this subdiscipline forward and why the perspective is significant not only for the health of humans, but also for the health of other animals, and indeed for the health of the planet that we all inhabit together. On these grounds, I propose a turn from medical semiotics to health semiotics. This program for semiotics would encompass not only food and medicine, but also lifestyle and wellbeing, as well as the subjective, qualitative perspectivism that makes biosemiotics frontier research, thereby constituting a biosemioethics and promoting a semiotic fitness.
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Augmented photography can be used in the digital arts to over-code upon real-world environments with computer-generated data, in order to translate stimuli across sensory modalities, and thereby extent or increase our faculties for... more
Augmented photography can be used in the digital arts to over-code upon real-world environments with computer-generated data, in order to translate stimuli across sensory modalities, and thereby extent or increase our faculties for perceiving spatial and temporal relations. Because of this media- specific affordance, the augmentation of the photographic medium may have especial application for the “physiognomic gaze”, a way of doing “form interpretation” or “nature knowing” based on the physical behaviors and psychological phenomena of the human face, head and body. The innovativeness of such technological prosthetics becomes manifest how new ways are generated to both perceive and to know those experiences that were previously unseeable or otherwise unsensable. Here, I converse with Cedric Kiefer (co-founder and creative lead) of the onformative studio for digital art and design in Germany about their works Meandering River (2017), Pathfinder (2014) and Google Faces (2013). And we explore how onformative uses the augmented photograph in their digital artworks to extend the physiognomic gaze, bringing data not visible to the naked eye into the senseable sphere, to offer the audience different perspectives about space and time.
Obogateno fotografijo lahko v digitalni umetnosti uporabljamo, da resnično okolje prekodiramo s pomočjo računalniško generiranih podatkov, zato da prevedemo dražljaje med različnimi čutnimi modalitetami in tako razširimo ali povečamo naše sposobnosti zaznavanja prostorskih in časovnih razmerij. Zaradi te medijsko specifične dostopnosti je lahko bogatenje fotografskega medija posebno koristno za »fiziognomičen pogled«, način ustvarjanja »interpretacij oblik« ali »naravne vednosti« temelječ na fizičnih obnašanjih in psihološkem fenomenu človeškega obraza, glave in telesa. Inovativnost takšnih tehnoloških protez se manifestira na nove načine, ki so ustvarjeni za dojemanje in poznavanje tistih izkušenj, ki so bili pred tem nevidni ali kako drugače nezaznavni. V prispevku se pogovarjam s Cedricom Kieferjem (soustanoviteljem in kreativnim vodjem) iz studia onformative za digitalno umetnost in oblikovanje v Nemčiji, In sicer o njihovem delu Vijugajoča reka (Meandering River, 2017), Pathfinder (2014) in Googlovi obrazi (Google Faces, 2013). Raziskala sva, kako onformative uporablja obogateno fotografijo v svojih digitalnih umetniških delih, da razširi fiziognomičen pogled ter s tem prinaša informacije, ki niso vidne s prostim očesom, v sfero čutov in ponudi občinstvu drugačen pogled na prostor in čas.
Obogateno fotografijo lahko v digitalni umetnosti uporabljamo, da resnično okolje prekodiramo s pomočjo računalniško generiranih podatkov, zato da prevedemo dražljaje med različnimi čutnimi modalitetami in tako razširimo ali povečamo naše sposobnosti zaznavanja prostorskih in časovnih razmerij. Zaradi te medijsko specifične dostopnosti je lahko bogatenje fotografskega medija posebno koristno za »fiziognomičen pogled«, način ustvarjanja »interpretacij oblik« ali »naravne vednosti« temelječ na fizičnih obnašanjih in psihološkem fenomenu človeškega obraza, glave in telesa. Inovativnost takšnih tehnoloških protez se manifestira na nove načine, ki so ustvarjeni za dojemanje in poznavanje tistih izkušenj, ki so bili pred tem nevidni ali kako drugače nezaznavni. V prispevku se pogovarjam s Cedricom Kieferjem (soustanoviteljem in kreativnim vodjem) iz studia onformative za digitalno umetnost in oblikovanje v Nemčiji, In sicer o njihovem delu Vijugajoča reka (Meandering River, 2017), Pathfinder (2014) in Googlovi obrazi (Google Faces, 2013). Raziskala sva, kako onformative uporablja obogateno fotografijo v svojih digitalnih umetniških delih, da razširi fiziognomičen pogled ter s tem prinaša informacije, ki niso vidne s prostim očesom, v sfero čutov in ponudi občinstvu drugačen pogled na prostor in čas.
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With the algorithmic age of computable emotions, an increasing number of digital artists base the form of their Internet or sculptural installation on Automated Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA), and its functionality achieved via the... more
With the algorithmic age of computable emotions, an increasing number of digital artists base the form of their Internet or sculptural installation on Automated Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA), and its functionality achieved via the photographic documentation in face databases. These contemporary artists make visible a digital habit of thought that objectivates the human face into a plastic grotesque of grimacing extremis, and the self inside out into the universal or utilitarian. Yet, most AFEA systems–a term little clarified and much confused with facial recognition or biometrics–are ‘black box’ frameworks. Introduced by the technological industry and scientific experts, such proprietary closed source algorithms veil the majority of program functionality input from available data output, hiding how it works from immediate observation by artist and audience. By problematizing Julius von Bismarck’s Public Face (2008-14) and its intermedial genealogies, I probe the extent to which AFEA represents the face and its expression of emotion from a technostalgic view that reduces scientific complexity, while informing how we think about what we feel today.
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With this Thesis, I problematize the intellectual historiography behind keyword coding–or key-wording–for facial expressions of emotion, emotion-based, and emotions-like phenomena in the German socio-cultural media imaginary. Using... more
With this Thesis, I problematize the intellectual historiography behind keyword coding–or key-wording–for facial expressions of emotion, emotion-based, and emotions-like phenomena in the German socio-cultural media imaginary. Using digital research techniques to perform a federated query that links word-organized archival content, I depart from the new Media Art Research Thesaurus to comparatively analyse keyword-coded information resources–or “artworks”–on the online Graphic Art Collection of Göttweig Abbey and the Archive of Digital Art: Johann Nepomuk Strixner’s 1808-1815 Master Study of Albrecht Dürer’s The Four Apostles, and Julius von Bismarck, Benjamin Maus, and Richard Whelmer’s 2008, 2010, and 2014 Public Face. By this meta-analysis I will prove how, in this our Algorithmic Age, that to ask the “face question” calls for a digital literacy in the “black box” keyword concepts by which the artistic, scientific, and technological cultural sectors today operationalize facial expressions into universal as well as utilitarian attributes, and code individual expressors into typologies. I pose that these keyword metadata function along with image-resources to “turn real lives into writing” for the computation, datafication, and even commodification of the facial expression of emotion. But I also propose that such keyword metadata have, since at least the Age of Print, functioned as an “auxiliary organ” or technological prosthesis for extending naked or natural perception of our own faces as well as the faces of others, and thereby overcome the limitations of our own emotional intelligence.
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In "Curating Bodies" (digital screenshots, 2017), I disrupt the audience-artwork hierarchy of the white cube, decoding both normative scripting rules and transgressive display rituals in the exhibition space, to disclose the reciprocal... more
In "Curating Bodies" (digital screenshots, 2017), I disrupt the audience-artwork hierarchy of the white cube, decoding both normative scripting rules and transgressive display rituals in the exhibition space, to disclose the reciprocal feedback between image and schema of the body.