Masked Reality Self Performance

Here i create a video of my own face recorded through the Masked Reality art system i have made. The main piece is setup in a way for audience faces to transform into Theyyam and Kathakali performance forms simultaneously, here i create a recording of my face with each of the performance forms individually with my face revealed. Description of the piece - 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. The system runs in a real-time interactive manner with a modified surveillance camera and 2 Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) running simultaneously.