Name: Face2Face: From Lamprey Grid's to the Bounding Box
Start: 2026-10-07T13:30:00-0400
End: 2026-10-07T14:00:00-0400

Face2Face: From Lamprey Grid's to the Bounding Box

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT

Studio

What does it mean to encounter someone’s face across time? Face2Face is a research-based art project that draws conceptual parallels between 19th-century anthropological photography and contemporary facial recognition systems, critically examining how images function as enduring tools for classification, surveillance, and ideological control. Both of these forms of “scopic regimes of modernity” view photos as unbiased, objective data that can help in understanding human identity and character through facial structure analysis.

This project draws on the photographic archive of the British colonial administrator Maurice Vidal Portman, who, in the 1890s, photographed the native people of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. These images were produced using Lamprey’s Grid system, a chequered backdrop designed for anthropometric measurement. Colonial subjects were often posed nude, with measuring sticks against the grid. Their bodies became measurable visual evidence for imperial knowledge systems that advanced a pseudoscientific theory of racial hierarchy. Today, these violative images circulate through digital archives such as the British Museum, where they exist as visual datasets.

Face2Face is an interactive art installation that recreates this colonial photographer’s studio and reimagines his lens as a facial recognition system that categorizes the audience. This system is trained on a biased dataset derived from Portman's images and related writings. Here, the colonial archive is transformed into an active computational apparatus—one that gazes at and classifies viewers according to antiquated logics. Through real-time algorithmic categorization, the viewer is placed in the position of the original subject. This encounter foregrounds how these vision systems produce knowledge by reducing humans to data while obscuring their subjectivity. These archival interventions collapse the past and present by tracing a continuum between anthropological photography and computer vision. Face2Face employs historical images not as passive vessels of memory but as active materials that inform visual literacy and cultural memory.

Speakers

Anshul Roy

PhD student, University of Colorado Boulder

Anshul Roy (b. 1997, India) is a visual artist with an MFA in Art Photography (2024) from Syracuse University in New York and a B.Tech in Bioengineering (2020) from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. Currently, he is a PhD student in the Critical Media Practices department... Read More →

Srikar Hari

PhD student, University of Colorado Boulder

Srikar Hari (b. 1993, India) is a visual artist, currently pursuing his PhD in the Critical Media Practices department of the University of Colorado Boulder. He holds an MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, USA and a Bachelor’s in Digital Video Production from... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Studio

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IVLA 2026 Charleston

Anshul Roy

Srikar Hari

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IVLA 2026 Charleston

Anshul Roy

Srikar Hari

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