The face is a deceptively complex structure. Individual parts have their own specific functions – the eyes for seeing, the nose for smelling – yet they have a collective existence too: the face is a constellation of features, a unique three-dimensional barcode of our identity.

The many aspects of the face were the inspiration for Sandra Kemp, Director of Research at the Royal College of Art: “What I wanted to do was ask the question ‘what is a face?’ by putting together a range of different disciplines. My exhibition brings together art, science and technology and asks what a face is, what a face is for, and what faces might be like in the future at the convergence of art, science and technology.”

As her research for the show progressed, her ideas changed radically. “When I started off I really wanted to do a show on multimedia portraiture. As I went along it became clear to me that portraiture was bound up with the forensic and the imaging techniques used in surgery.” Similar digital technologies were being exploited by very different groups: what did they have in common, and what was their shared heritage?

She also felt that science and art shows hadn’t fully explored the roles and practices of the two cultures: “So I wanted to do a show where through telling juxtaposition artist and scientists have asked the same question, perhaps for a different purpose, or have borrowed each other’s techniques, to see if bringing together two different forms of knowledge and disparate knowledge bases would enhance our understanding of the face.”

The broken face

One of her starting points was facial repair and reconstructive surgery. Facial repair has been practised for centuries, but it was the horrors of World War I (and anaesthetics) that ushered in the modern age of reconstructive surgery. A crucial figure was the British surgeon Howard Gillies, who established a special hospital at Sidcup to handle the flood of casualties from the Western Front. His teams of surgeons pioneered many procedures that are still used in cosmetic and medical surgery today.

But, Professor Kemp points out, Sidcup was not the exclusive domain of surgeons. “One of the most surprising things about Sidcup is the interdisciplinary nature of the work that went on there. So as well as doctors and surgeons, there were dentists and, perhaps surprisingly, artists and sculptors.”

One artist, Henry Tonks, made a series of moving pastel portraits of the soldiers. These had practical value: “Gillies drew on these sketches some of the surgical procedureswhich he planned to carry out and the results formed part of the case notes.” Echoes of this artistic involvement can be seen in the modern-day work of Mark Gilbert, who has collaborated with facial surgeon Iain Hutchison, producing portraits of patients before, during and after surgery.

Tonks’s and Gilbert’s works also highlight an uncomfortable feature of portraiture: how rarely the ‘disfigured’ face is ever seen.

New techniques

New technologies have constantly been exploited to probe deeper into face form and function – by both artists and scientists. Photography, for example, was popularised very quickly, often for unusual purposes.

In Victorian England, the carte-de-visite, a photograph of oneself or one’s family, became a popular ‘calling card’ (and often a surreptitious status symbol, carefully displaying one’s home or prized belongings). More bizarrely, pictures of the dead were hugely popular. Pictures of Victorian families, with a dead child propped up for the camera, eyes painted in after exposure, are deeply disconcerting to modern viewers.

These social uses were not the only application of photography. “It was very quickly deployed for forensic purposes as well,” points out Professor Kemp. “A photographer called Bertillon started photographing criminals and building up, in police archives, a classification, a way of recording people you may want to track down again. His earliest use of photography became what we now know as the mugshot.”

Bertillon’s fascination with the physical characteristics of the face was shared with another influential figure of the Victorian era, Francis Galton. Darwin’s cousin, and the founder of eugenics, Galton was obsessed by inheritance, and how traits could be passed down from generation to generation. These could be mental or physical – or in the case of the face, a combination of the two. The structure of the face, he believed, revealed something about a person’s true character.

Galton was not the first to draw this conclusion – Pythagoras wrote about it in Physiognomica – but he took it a step further by superimposing photographic images to try to capture physical features shared by particular groups, such as criminals. Galton called his images ‘composites’, but his search for the ‘criminal chin’ ended in failure. Even worse, the composites made the villains look more handsome.

Galton’s composites echo modern-day ‘morphed’ images. Morphing, digitally combining multiple images, is another technology that has been exploited by both scientists and artists. Scientists have used it and other forms of digital manipulation to explore the features of the face that underlie, for example, beauty or femininity/masculinity.Artists have used the technology in a variety of innovative ways, particularly to examine notions of individual versus group identity or to challenge stereotyping.

While physiognomic principles are, at best, of doubtful veracity, much can be read from the face. Its role in social communication also interests scientists and artists. “I was very concerned to interrogate further the relationship between the inside and the outside,” Professor Kemp explains. “If your face is your identity then what happens when you become faceless, or you can’t see other faces, or you no longer have the power to express yourself through the face?”

A poignant example is provided by clinical neurophysiologist Jonathan Cole, who in his book About Face describes ‘Mary’, a stroke patient unable to move her face. Mary felt isolated, incapable of interacting with the outside world. She died soon after.

In conditions such as autism, by contrast, the ability to read meaning into facial features is impaired or absent. How faces contribute to the socially complex world in which we now live is an area of growing scientific interest, along with how impairments might be involved in schizophrenia and psychological disorders.

Digital worlds

What of the future? In medicine, imaging techniques are offering exciting possibilities for planning surgery or for creating faces desired by patients. But, says Professor Kemp, the infinite possibilities of cyberspace offer disquietening probabilities: “If you can replicate, say, beauty digitally, absolutely perfectly, what kind of impact does that have on how we want to look ourselves? There is already evidence that people are having surgery to mirror artistic or media views of what faces ought to look like.”

The impact of virtual representations of the face is, she suggests, going to be just as crucial as the physical changes achieved by the surgeon’s scalpel: “I feel passionately that, as well as being aware of the pros and cons of the face transplant and other kinds of surgical techniques, we should be looking more at the impact of imaging technology on the arts and depictions of beauty and facial acceptability, as these seem to be narrowing rather than broadening.”

To start with, she imagined the future of the face would be something like the ‘extreme’ cliched faces so beloved of Star Trek. “Although those extreme forms are interesting in terms of thinking about what a face is, I think the potential impact and dangers now lie in the now-ubiquitous faces that are impacting culturally. People are increasingly attracted to ‘impossible’ faces that can exist in the digital world but not in reality.

“Quietly, subtly in very diverse arts- and media-driven ways, there is a virtual revolution going on and we’re not really noticing it.”

External links

• Future Face at the Science Museum