STATEMENT

TLDR : Our social lives are digital performances, and our choice to opt out of this theater decreases every day.

For Canal Convergence 2025 ‘SHOWTIME’, New American Public Art and Wonderspaces have re-imagined Your Big Face into Recognition, perhaps its logical evolution for this day and age.

This version of the work simplifies the participant interaction by using facial tracking. Participants need only be in the view of the camera and the facial tracking will choose someone, lock on, and project their face on the Big Face. The performance of the work is by the participants and for the participants, the audience as the actors. It is a gross reflection, a distorted echo in the uncanny valley, a playful critique of our narcissism and delusions of grandeur. Will the participants, enlisted without consent, by their mere proximity, be fearful or angered by this intrusion and mimicry of personal identity? Or will it wash over them, like so many other small incursions of personal technology have done? Or will it be simply a fun moment in a dark, loud and busy light festival? 

To these ends we have renamed the work RECOGNITION, alluding to controversial technology, and our narcissistic attempts to be recognized in the digital landscape.

The line between our everyday lives and theatrical performance has blurred as the age of information seeks to monetize our identities and choices. Performance to our peers, encouraged by and filtered through corporate controlled social media, has become the status quo. Today, more than ever before, we are all forced to perform for each other through digital tools and wear digital masks. It is increasingly common that these masks do not ask permission.    

Our social lives are now digital performances. This digital performance is mandatory, and the artfulness of it, determines our social success. We are in an age where this performance is not only compulsory, we are subjected to it without our consent. We are drafted as actors and audiences without choice. Our social lives are a theater-in-the-round panopticon where our instinctual need for human connection is mediated by corporate technology that does not have our best interests in mind.