Everyday Facial Yoga reconciles our human relationship to our facial expressions, movements, facial muscles and nerves with those of a machine. The film depicts a speculative facial yoga tutorial lead by Animoji avatars, who teach a series of exercises that train facial muscles to allow the user to better manipulate and control their face in front of emotional recognition devices.
This work was inspired by the discovery of a patent Facebook filed in 2018 that would read users facial expressions to create correlating animal and emotional ‘masks’ such as ‘Angry Bird’ and ‘Happy Panda’. The film was developed as part of an investigation into emotional recognition software and biometric data collection, protection and disruption.
In 2016, Facebook launched Masks, an augmented reality mask which allowed users to apply in live and still imagery. Facebook has also been creating thematic masks for brands as a revenue stream. In 2018 the brand filed a patent for Dynamic Mask Application. This ‘smart’ Mask, if you will, reads the users face for emotional data and determines as mask that fits that users current emotional state. This product has not yet launched and the patent is pending.
