Masked Reality

In this work, a viewer’s facial expressions are transformed into those of a (female) Kathakali performer juxtaposed simultaneously with that of a (male) Theyyam ritual performer.

Kathakali is a performance art deeply informed by upper caste, Sanskrit aesthetics and epic, patronized by royal families and “sattvic” temples(where typically the scheduled castes had no entry); Theyyam, a deity possession ritual, is locally varied and participated in typically by the lower castes in India. Here, i try to create a work, which uses the same technology of facial recognition being used for surveillance and perpetuating bias further, in the context of being used here as a medium for social empathy, to bring light to social justice frameworks, where one sees themselves as both an upper and lower caste performer, a female and male form simultaneously.

There are 2 AI algorithms at play here. The first learns to identify the structure of a face in real-time, and the second learns to generate corresponding performance art faces by transforming the detected face to a face with painting rituals of a Theyyam or a Kathakali performer. i record a video capturing the 9 rasas (emotions) that are popoular in Indian 'Natya Shashtra'- a Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts.