And He Will Tell You the Truth

All ten masks have their backs to you. Each one is set against a mirror, and only the mirror sees its front; every face in the room is a face in a mirror. Oscar Wilde said, “Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” I break a face down into numbers, then carve it into a mask.

Each mask comes from one expression of a real performer. The expression is first read as values on the 52 coefficients the iPhone uses for face tracking: how far the brow lifts, how far the jaw drops, each from 0 to 1. Quite a few products that judge “emotion” run on numbers like these; it is how a machine writes down a face today. The Nuo mask, worn in village rituals across southern China, including in Hunan, where I come from, is another way of writing a face. The machine only reads the values and divides the face into zones; each zone is matched, by rules we set, to a form that already exists in an atlas of Nuo masks, and carvers then carve the mask by hand; most of the ten were carved in Jiangxi, one in Guizhou. Nowhere along the way does the machine invent a new shape.

The two ways of writing a face do not fully line up. Of the 52 coefficients, 13 have nothing to match in the Nuo atlas, among them the mouth shifting left or right, dimples and rolled lips, and we did not make anything up for them. The expression has been recognized, but where does the emotion come from?