Machine-Readable Faces investigates how facial images have been operationalised, reshaping the conditions under which identity becomes intelligible and computable. Moving across visual semiotics, digital humanities, and computational studies, the book traces the emergence of facial data—from early digitisation experiments to dataset-driven practices—and shows how the face has been reconfigured as a proxy within technical infrastructures.
Along this trajectory, facial archives, large-scale image datasets, and training processes within computational infrastructures are analysed at the intersection of visual culture and computational modelling. The book develops a theoretical framework centred on three operative praxes—modelling, archiving, and tagging—through which facial images function as both meta-linguistic operators and infrastructural agents of recognition. This framework offers a critical rearticulation of the epistemological and cultural implications of data-driven identity.
Grounded in an interdisciplinary exchange, the book will interest scholars and graduate students working on machine vision, digital culture, and the philosophy of technology, as well as those engaged in visual culture, media sociology, and feminist and gender studies.
Table of Contents:
Foreword by Morgan Klaus Scheuerman; Introduction: The machine-readable Face; 1. The Emergence of the Facial Image: From Recognition to Digitisation and Back Again; 2. Facial Images as Identity Proxies: From Operability to Digital Re-embodiment; 3. Transition: Reverse Engineering: From Proxies to Praxes; 4. Ratio; 5. Spatio; 6. Dispositio; Conclusions: Lines of Flight of Recognition
About the Author :
Cristina Voto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Studies at the University of Turin, Italy. She is a member of the doctoral board of the Diseño y Creación program at Universidad de Caldas (Colombia) and of the Artes y Tecno-Estéticas program at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (Argentina), and serves as Vice President of the Latin American Federation of Semiotics. Her research focuses on visual semiotics at the intersection of the philosophy of technology and gender studies. She has published across these fields, including articles, edited volumes, and the monograph Monstruos audiovisuales. Agentividad, movimiento y morfología (Aracne, 2021). She has collaborated with universities and artistic institutions, including Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the University of the West of England, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento.
