Working Thesis Title: Deadpan artefacts: the politics and aesthetics of facial expression recognition in dialogue with the history of photographic practice

Supervisors: Dr Katrina Sluis, Dr Mitchell Whitelaw, Associate Professor Martyn Jolly, Dr Kate Warren, Dr Sean Dockray

Melita Dahl is a visual artist, working primarily with photography and moving image. Her current research interests extend to the history of portraiture, the ethics of data collection and curation, and the ethical and moral rights issues surrounding consent and copyright.

Melita’s research builds on work that critically explores the politics and aesthetics of computational technologies in dialogue with the history of photographic practice. Her current focus has become the neutral face—which can be measured with a Facial Expression Recognition (FER) tool—in which she has found correlations to the ubiquitous “deadpan” expression: an intriguing standard adopted by fine art photographic portraiture since the 1920s. As a Doctor of Philosophy candidate at ANU School of Art and Design, she explores the visual economy of FER through an encounter with the traditional photographic studio, a photographic cultural collection (whereby the archive becomes a dataset for a data visualisation) and the video essay format. Her case studies on the subject of the deadpan are attuned to questions of neutrality and how the neutral plays out in the fields of portraiture, photography and technology.