U3A Bury St Edmunds Monthly Talk - Faces and Masks

Today I went into town for the latest U3A Bury St. Edmunds Monthly lecture at The APEX.

This was the listing...

"Guest Speaker, Dr Steve Jones – Is a research engineer who is allegedly retired.  As an alternative to turning to crime, among a varied range of activities, he sculpts, casts bronze and gives the occasional talk on gardening and art. 

We’re all obsessed with faces. Recognising people and controlling the way we look is a survival skill, but it’s only partly under our control, and can go spectacularly wrong. Masks conceal and alter features, and are used for many reasons in all cultures. They affect both the wearer, the observer and their interactions. Sometimes we’re not even aware of their existence: what you see isn’t necessarily what you get.

This talk will examine our obsession with faces and also look at the sometimes surprising uses of masks, from earliest times to the present day."

It was a wide-ranging and fascinating talk and this evening I investigated for myself some of the things Steve covered. I found the analysis of "average faces" - creating a composite image from photos of an unspecified number of men and women between the ages of 18-25 particularly interesting. 

Here is an article about the research. This composite photo combining Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump was particularly memorable. 

The ability to generate synthetic faces is now getting very realistic. See here and Try this, for example. You can even generate full body images (see here). Use it with real faces and you can easily create deep-fake news. Scary.

We were given an interesting discussion and pictures of make-up, as a sort of masking, before we got onto masks themselves, with great examples from across cultures and across the ages. The masked Canadian policeman was, I thought, particularly disturbing.

I didn't know that, until photography came along, creating death masks was quite common. Steve showed us several including that of Beethoven. That of  the unknown woman of the Seine... 

...became a popular fixture on the walls of artists' homes after 1900. Her visage inspired numerous literary works.

Can you recognise these 12 modern masks?

You can find the answers here.

Steve posed interesting questions about automated facial recognition and how technology now enables pervasive tracking. Maybe we will all end up like the venetians and walk around in public in masks to avoid being recognised?

A great Talk. Thanks, Steve.