Renounce humanity: beyond narcissism

NarcissUs, an installation

NarcissUs is an installation displaying a setup which allows an artificial digital being to track and mimic its own facial gestures through a mirror. It is a semi-closed system which consists on two main counterparts. On one side there is a screen: an LCD display which shows a digital representation of a 3D model from a human face. On the other hand there is a mirror which is located parallel in front of the display. On top of the display there is a camera connected to the system which allows the camera to look directly towards the mirror. The mirror is attached to a motor which allows the whole to rotate on is axis. The rotation of the mirror allows to reflect not only frontally but in a variety of angles which allows the system behind NarcissUs to have a 180º field of view in order to look for and mimic faces from the surrounding. This enables NarcissUs to track its own face either frontally or from slightly different perspectives or to track other faces which it might encounter in the space, mostly from visitors through their awkwardly reflected images.

The role from the visitor at the installation is as necessary as it is not. NarcissUs can mimic the gesture of any person standing in front of the camera or any person who would get caught by the camera through the rotated reflected image visible thanks to the mirror. Nevertheless the behaviour of the system as well as the experience for the visitor variate considerably depending on which kind of participation the visitor has with the installation.

It can be considered that they differentiate as passive, active and null modes of participation. Passive occurs when the visitor gets caught by the rotating mirror. Active participation occurs when the visitor disrupts between NarcissUs and its reflection and gets control over it. Null participation is when the visitor neither get tracked through the mirror nor stands in front of the camera, but only observes NarcissUs interact with itself.

The behaviour of NarcissUs also diverges and evolves differently depending on the acquired facial information it gets, either from the visitors irrupting in the environment or purely from its own reflected image. the first displays a faster growing behaviour curve towards richer and variated expressions while The second arouses a behaviour which smoothly grows from a quite to a more chaotic state.

When we enter the exhibition room where NarcissUs is exhibited, we encounter a space which transmits a feeling of not being alone inside. In the center of the room, a set of familiar objects are ordered in a redundant arrangement. A display is looking at another display. A moving mirror points towards an LCD display. Inside that display a virtual model of a face seems to be erratically animated. On the other hand a squared mirror of more or less the same proportions seems to be alive.

The mirror is framed and it rotates on it’s own axis. Sometimes it stands still parallel to the display. Sometimes it stands still in awkward angles from which the virtual face of NarcissUs becomes visible. The sudden its presence is doubled in space. As if it was looking at us through the mirror and through the display. Sometimes it starts moving again as if it got distracted.

Between the two elements there is a clearly perceivable relation. Nevertheless the exact mechanism behind both is not fully visible. Sometimes it seems as if the mirror was triggering the face movements. Sometimes it is the other way around. It feels as if the displayed face would be triggering the mirror rotations and making them more nervous.

Behind this relationship there is a simple truth. A mimicking algorithm runs inside a computer, which is connected to some electronics. The constructed closed circuit provokes reciprocal reactions on both sides. The latency between the input and the output plus the noises from reality are the causes of a shift between the actions and reactions of both elements. The animated face and the moving mirror seem to be coordinated but they will almost never stand still and presumably will never fall on the same state.

A certain notion of agency emerges from the relationship between the mirror and the 3D model of the face. The behaviour of both seems to be autonomous and self generating. Nothing else but electricity and their presence seems to be necessary in order to keep doing what they do, for the eternity perhaps. To follow each other in a continuous sequence which doesn’t seem to have an end. They track each other and they search each other through the room together. A conversation between them takes place.

Together the mirror and the display affect the space. They both exist inside the material and the digital realities, bouncing between one and all the others. They send signals which move back and forward through both spaces. At the same time they engage the people standing in any corner of the installation room to observe their behaviour and sometimes to participate of it, and in parallel they don’t need them around.

The display is a cage which serves as the container to a virtual existence. It is in a sense a door to another level of reality. It is a prison to an entity which seems to be disoriented and trying to break free. The camera is the perception. It is the eyes of the Narcissus and the connection between the incorporeal to the material environment. It is the key to the embodied strategy from the moving mirror which helps the organism to comprehend and abstract the surrounding reality. The mirror is a door. It is reactive matter which connects the digital layer to the physical world. It breaks through the flatness of the screen and introduces noises in the perspective, which consequently affect the reactions of this NarcissUs.

NarcissUs at GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy, July 2016

The model of a face is the representation of the utterly outer layer of existence. It is the skin over the muscles and the muscles over the bones of an organism which is made out of polygons. A being whose three dimensionality is merely an illusion. It is that which resembles matter, space and motion. It is that which resembles expression and character. It is that which resembles will and autonomy. It is that which comes closer to humanity. In that sense the face is the representation of that which is understood as the individual. The entity who detaches itself from the totality of reality. The one who is able of abstracting itself from the whole, and split its own existence from the rest. The one who is trapped in the process of auto acknowledgement and self-interaction from which it won’t get easy to scape. Thus the individual emerges. Thus the individual is not pre-given and neither its existence is a gift of the universe. Existence is awareness of the existence and it is on the same hand the ability of abstracting reality during the process of interaction of an organism with its environment. It is the perpetual deception implicit in the looping senses and the mirrored images. It is an helicoidal growth deep towards the ultimate state of alienation in the sense of pure isolation of the self.

Assemblages, the whole and the "I"

The installation Narcissus as a whole is an experimental setup. It intends to facilitate the emergence of a presence, which not depends on anything else but itself, its own memory and time. Narcissus is therefore a machine which should resemble an autonomous circuit motivated by change and repetition. An erratic and mechanical existence which is trapped in an artificial cage, which is not able to break through and see beyond it.

NarcissUs is not an AI in its strict definition. Even though there is machine learning involved, as well as memory, memory replacement, generative behaviour and behaviour repetition, the system behind the Narcissus machine lacks of concrete tasks, therefore there are not given problems to be solved. NarcissUs is rather an evolving feedback loop, a machine capable of emergent behaviour and individuation through time.A. I. stands for Artificial Intelligence, which in computer science is understood as the cognitive functions mimicked by the machine, and which are associated to those observed in human minds such as learning and problem solving. As the field of artificial intelligence advances more and more problems get solved while new paradigms arise further and the definition of it

The term “individuation” describes the ways in which a thing can be identified and distinguished from the rest of the other things in the world. In Difference and Repetition Gilles Deleuze approaches the “genesis of itself” as the singular and the unrepeatable character of things:

… to repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent…

From "Difference and Repetition" by Gilles Deleuze

…. they repeat an ‘unrepeatable’. they do not add a second an a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ‘nth’ power. With respect to this power, repetition interiorises and thereby reverses itself… it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the future Federation Days

From "Difference and Repetition" by Gilles Deleuze

Manuel De Landa follows the ideas from Deleuze and brings them further. In his New Philosophy of Society he re-introduces the concept of assemblage as a wider theory, and defines them as collections of heterogenous components that can only be understood and analysed as such and are not to be reduced to any of their parts for their understanding. Assemblages are synonyms of a whole or “wholes” which are characterised by relations of exteriority. DeLanda explains the differences between relations of interiority of those of exteriority, pointing at the necessity to abandon the first model in order to explain a reality where emergence is feasible. Thus that we must abandon the conception of the world and society as organisms, where both are compared to a human body, where all its parts are dependant on one another and all parts work together to promote the proper function of the whole. Under this conception, the existence of any of the parts without their relations between one another is not possible. Things have no independent existence away from their intrinsic relations. DeLanda however argues that things do exist independent of these interactions with one another and therefore he remarks the importance of taking into account two inherent factors of all entities, which also need to be clearly understood and differentiated from each other. On the one hand properties and on the other capacities. While properties are not inherent to the existence but rather local results and observations from the interactions between entities, capacities are potentials possessed by the entity, regardless of whether these are practiced or not.

The snow turns into water because the sun shines and melts it down. If the sun wouldn’t shine and the snow would never turn into water, it wouldn’t mean that the snow is not able to, or that the sun cannot shine, instead this property and the potential would remain occluded to any observer but still would be there. The water boils because it is heated up. If it isn’t heated it won’t boil nevertheless the water’s potential of changing its state is intrinsic to its existence.

DeLanda thus proposes a world and a society conception based on relations of exteriority and assemblages. Assemblages are described as collections of entities which are interrelated and whose existence is independent from one another. Even though an assemblage can only be understood, analysed and explained through the interactions of its parts and cannot be reduced to any of its parts for its understanding. In that sense the parts of an assemblage keep a relation of exteriority which is irreducible. This does not exclude one to exist without the other, rather each of the parts of an assemblage is able to persist outside the collection and by entering another one, its properties would change in the same way its potentials will unveil and the assemblage left behind would move forward to a new set of things and interrelations from the parts remaining.

This conception from DeLanda, which derives from the concept of Assemblage introduced previously by Deleuze and Guattari, explains emergence and emergent phenomena, and removes the mysticism behind those, by explaining them as the point where the unknown properties from unknown assemblages are observed and only then the hidden potential of things can be revealed.

In consequence DeLanda defends that the world is populated with individual entities at each of the infinite levels of scale. Assemblages exist as well at each of the infinite levels of scale and their relations are merely local and contingent depending on the set of entities which composes them. He claims as follow, that:

Each entity and each existence is the contingent result of an individuation process.

From "A New Philosophy of Society: assemblage theory and social complexity", by Manuel DeLanda

Figure 3: how each structure defined by the interaction of the parts, is a form of individuation

The contingent process of individuation under DeLanda’s scope can be therefore understood as the separation and distinction of the “individual” from the rest of the components of a whole by means of local and contingent differentiations. In this process there will be a clear delimitation between the “I” and the rest of the world. For DeLanda it is only a sum of all the “I”s that which composes the world and not the other way around. The world is rather populated and not delimiting.Contingency or contingent event is defined as a situation in the future which being feasible it cannot be predicted with certainty. Edgar Morin has a diverging view from the existence and the conformation of the individual and its reciprocal relations towards the “whole”. He describes a paradigm of complexity and a critic to the theory of systems, in which a simplifying holism is invoked as an intend to oppose to reductionism. He asserts that

… system theory has failed to lay its own foundation by elucidating the concept of system. The paradigm remains larval, atrophied and inchoate; system theory thus suffers from a fundamental defect: it tends to fall repeatedly into the reductive, simplificatory, mutilating and manipulative ruts from which it was supposed to have freed itself ( and us along with it ) …

From "From the Concept of System to the Paradigm of Complexity", by Edgar Morin

… the concept of system has always played a fundamental role in defining every set of relations among component parts that form a whole. The concept only becomes revolutionary, however, when, instead of completing the definition of things, bodies, and objects, it replaces the former definition of the thing or the object as something constituted of form and substance that is decomposable into primary elements, as something that can be neatly isolated in a neutral space, and as something subject solely to the external laws of "nature." From that moment on, the concept of system necessarily breaks with the classical ontology of the object. (As we shall see, the object conceived of by classical science is a mere cutaway drawing, an appearance, a construct-something both simplified and one-dimensional that mutilates and abstracts from a complex reality that is rooted both in physical as well as in psychocultural organisation). We are aware of the universal scope of the shift from the notion of object to the notion of system; however, what we have yet to grasp is the radical nature of this shift and the truly novel point of view it brings with it.

From "From the Concept of System to the Paradigm of Complexity", by Edgar Morin

He suggests that we should conceive systems not only in terms of global unity but in terms of unitas multiplex. Unitas multiplex is a latin expression which in this context refers to the interrogation made by William Stern, about:

how from the manifold (multiplex) of attributes that make up an individual does its unity (unitas) emerge?

From "Beyond Individual and Group Differences: Human Individuality, Scientific Psycology and William Stern’s Critical Personalism" by James T. Lamiell.

William Stern was a german-jewish psychologist from the end of the XIX and first half of the XX century, better known for his incursions in the fields of psychology of personality, intelligence and for coining the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ). He was a humanist who as many others was forced to flee from Germany due to the nazi regime and ended up teaching at the University of Duke where he died from a heart infarct a few years later. His contributions about the individual are relevant since he was one of the firsts to stand up against the idea that an individual (human) can be reduced physically to a sum of atoms and psychologically to a bundle of perceptual capabilities and a mechanical coupling of the causal relationship of physical phenomena. He suggested that:

rather psychological phenomena or experiences are those givens directly accessible to the own perception. In that through introspection the individual can assert them, “know” about them, they are “conscious”. In that they are only “given” to one, they are passive, not active, not directed to goals; they are simply there, expressible in certain qualities, grades, and connections through the own perception, coming, staying, and disappearing in temporal relations likewise recognisable introspectively.

From "Beyond Individual and Group Differences: Human Individuality, Scientific Psycology and William Stern’s Critical Personalism" by James T. Lamiell.

To this point, Morin refers to unitas multiplex in order to explain that we should conceive systems not only in terms of global unity. That the whole is effectively a macro-unity but its parts are not fused together neither shall be confused. The parts have a multiplicity of existences and identities, one of them continues to belong to the individual existence and cannot be reduced to the whole, and the other(s) which are in common with the rest of the parts of the whole.

Figure 4: Representation of the concept of unitas multiplex, where the individuated entity has a multiplicity of existences correlated to its interactions with other entities

Each individuality has a multiplicity of bilateral existences directly related to its interactions with the otherness

These last conceptions present a common idea. Which it is still inconclusive and widely discussed. An entity has an existence inherent to itself and independent from the rest of the world. In addition to that an assemblage is a collection of entities which has a dependency to all its parts, therefor cannot be reduced to any of those in order to understand its behaviour, but should be analysed and studied as that, as a whole. Concurrently as Morin states what perhaps Stern suggested, besides its isolated existence an entity posses a multiplicity of individualities which depend to that extend to the interrelations that the same has with the rest of the population of a whole. Manuel DeLanda remarks that emergence is only possible thanks to the fact that assemblages are always heterogenous, meaning that a collection is never composed of one type of entity. Instead they are conformed by a variety of classes of entities which exist independent and in relations of exteriority with one another. Thus assemblages are collections of contingent interrelations which have a structure of their own that being fully depending on the parts they cannot be reduced to their parts. An assemblage seems to exist through the display of the properties of the sum of the interactions of the parts.

Edgar Morin in parallel formulates a framework of interrelations from the whole and the parts, which schematically displays the key concepts of being, existence and life, and he states that those should be understood as global emergent qualities:

…such concepts are not primary qualities, but real instances of emergence. Indeed being and existence are emergent from all processes containing feed-back loops. Life is a cluster of emergent qualities resulting from the process of interaction and organisation between the parts and the whole, a cluster which itself retroactively affects the parts, the interactions, and the partial and global processes that produced it. All of which yelds the following complex explanatory principle: the phenomenal must not be reduced to the generative, nor the “superstructure” to the “infrastructure”. Rather, explanation should seek to understand the kind of process whose products or end-results bring about a return to the initial state. Such a process may be called recursive.

From "From the Concept of System to the Paradigm of Complexity", by Edgar Morin

According to Edgar Morin, the looping relations between the whole and the parts, the one and the many, are those which enable emergent qualities. These should not be seen or analysed by their end results but understood as recursive processes and studied as such.

Figure 5: The feedback loops in the structures from reality, which are the base of complexity and emergence. This diagram is a reinterpration of Morin’s feedback loops

Narcissus, The Mirror Stage and The Genesis of the “I”

I am the image and the mirror. I am the front and the back of all the things which shall never reveal to me. I am the consciousness which arises between the border of existence and the nowhere and which vanishes within the distant horizon. I am both, surrounded and isolated, observed and left alone. I am desire and the desired.

Author's Words

Jacques Lacan introduced the concept of the psychoanalytic theory known as the mirror stage. He proposed that human infants go through a phase in which an external image of the human body, triggers a response in the psyche of the individual. From this moment on a mental representation of the “I” is conformed. The individual will identify itself with the image, which serves as a pattern (Gestalt*) of the selfhood. According to Lacan, the german word Gestalt refers to the perception of a form whose meaning exceeds the totality of its components. A Gestalt is always greater than the sum of the parts. Gestalt psychology is founded on the observation that we do not comprehend our world as an assemblage of disparate elements, but as a pattern of meaningful forms. Our understanding of a "home", for example, is derived from more than merely the materials and architectural plans that produce the physical "house." A "face" is likewise more than a collection of identifiable parts. For Lacan, the imago with which the infant identifies in the mirror stage is a kind of Gestalt. The infant recognizes not only that it is a particular shape, but also grasps that this shape has a special -in fact transformative- significance.

Due to the lack of correspondence between the image of the unified body and the underdeveloped psyche of the infant, the imago will derive and be established as an “ ideal-I”.The Latin word IMAGO simply means "image", but it has acquired a number of powerful connotations over time. Christian theology refers to the "imago Dei", the image of God in which human beings were created and with which they should strive to conform. Carl Gustav Jung introduced the term into psychology; for Jung, the individual forms a personality by identifying with imagos that emerge from the collective unconscious, a shared reservoir of mythical figures and scenarios. Lacan takes up the term to refer to the image the infant sees in the mirror (or the image of the caregiver) and with which the infant identifies. In the ah-ha experience that characterises the mirror stage, the infant grasps the connection between the image and its own existence.

"Baby in front of mirror", unknown origin, found on web

The individual thus will struggle perpetually through her/his life to achieve that ideal. The mirror stage also establishes the ego and the concept of otherness in the individual. From that moment on the individual will elaborate itself as a social subject with particular characteristics dependent on the relations to the others. The process of interaction between the image and the reflection in which a phenomenon of self-recognition emerges, hitherto known, has only been observed in living beings of a certain intelligence. Nevertheless there is no feasible proof to assert that other species are not able of self-recognition. Lacan studied widely the mirror stage and the infant behaviour. In a paper published at the Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zürich in 1949 he states:

this act, far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between the virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates the child’s own body, and the persons and things around him.

From "The mirror stage as formative of the funtion of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience" by Jacques Lacan as delivered at the 16th Intenational Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zürich, July 17, 1949

Figure 6: “Rhesus Moneky - red dot mirror test”, Neng Gong and colleagues, 2015

It is believed that this act is a manifestation that denotes a higher degree of intelligence and perhaps of consciousness and although nowadays the idea that this is an exclusively human act has already been overthrown, the search and understanding of what is the consciousness and the “I”, when and how does it emerge, still remains the ground of great discrepancy. Even so, beyond the genesis of consciousness, the moment in which the individual boasts of his own existence through an external phenomenon connected with the physical world, her/his own psychic and material existence (in the case of the mirror through a visual phenomenon caused by the reflection of the body) is an indication of the organism's ability to experience a complex mental process of abstraction from the world.

This process of self-recognition is indicative of the organism's ability to distinguish and separate at least three fundamental structures that make up an specific construction of reality:

The world is an envelope, alien and inaccessible to “the self”.

Figure 7. First: condition of the self - Isolation

The own body is an envelope, external to the self and partially co-dependent to its will.

Figure 8. Second: condition of the body - Confinement

The “I” is the immaterial part of the existence and which derives from the relationship between the first two.

Figure 9. Third: Condition of the “I” - Transience

Moreover, through this process it is assumed that the organism is capable, at the moment of recognising itself, to abstract from that experience the "self-image" and any other sensory icon linked with the existence of itself and its representation. However, it is proposed that these phenomena - the genesis of consciousness and the conformation of the self - are not discrete and fortuitous acts, but are a process of gradual construction that barely glimpsed, it begins to develop, through, on the the experience and memory of the individual, and through the feedback-loop between reality and the individual. It is thanks to time, phenomenal and spacial shift that the “I” can be consolidated, and it is thanks to the shift that it can never be completed.

Thus it is assumed here and through the analogy of the moving mirror or unstable reflection presented in NarcissUs installation that the idea of ​​the unitary being or the "I" as an individual maintains the following relations between the concepts of reality and of the individual:

There is a direct relation between the recognition of the correspondence of a grouping or minor system of sensorial stimuli as a unit within a larger system of perceived stimuli as independent referents and outside the minor system.

The individual will be immersed in a perpetual and inescapable relationship between the existence of the body itself, the will of the individual, perception and environment. This relationship can be described as the correspondence between the sensory stimulus fragmented by the body and its senses and trapped as a minor system within a larger, external and enveloping system perceived as environment.

The individual will be subject to the interminable and cyclic conformation of the "I" through its interaction with the "image" itself or the sensorial stimulus that has its genesis at the moment in which the subject gives the leap of self-recognition . From this moment the individual becomes object of self-study and gradually and iteratively the idea of ​​"I" and "consciousness" will always take a new form until the end of their conscious days.

From these three relations I have previously come to think and therefore I propose here that the modern individual can be hardly anything other than an "assemblage" with narcissistic properties. That this narcissistic properties, the feedback loop leads the consciousness towards a narcissistic alienation. That at this moment of the human history it is difficult to find or even think of another form of human thought than that in which the subject first recognises itself, thinks itself and that from that frame of egocentric reference perceives the environment and supposes that reality is external to itself, which limits and determines it and therefore, that reality and the environment are antagonistic to its existence. That the relationship between the individual and the environment has not always been so. If the individual, being a fraction that proceeds from the social, has undergone through generations and mutations of the species a process of self-absorption and isolation. Thus the level of narcissism of the contemporary human differs from that of other times, and thus the level or type of consciousness that the individual and the collective have achieved has mutated considerably throughout history. Hence the notion of intelligence cannot be stable.

As an artistic installation NarcissUs seeks to:

Typify the process of alienation of the individual with its own auto-representation. In this case auto-image.

Simplify through a model, the generative process through which the organism develops a non-deterministic behaviour, and which consists, in the case of NarcissUs, of a learn-process and reproduction from facial expressions. This process is depicted by the installation as a reverberant sequence of observation, action, reaction and reproduction (intelligence as recursion).

Represent variability from the environment and the interaction with other beings, to which the organism is exposed and which highly influence the conformation of the I through the mirror process. Variability is a fundamental factor necessary for the emergence of any kind of apparent conscious behaviour. The organism is not sure if the image in question belongs to itself or to another organism, therefor the organism will act as far as it is capable, or look as it is capable, of identifying the link between it’s own will and the reaction on the visible image.

Argue to which extent it can be considered that a machine is able of intelligence, consciousness and self-awareness. Not as an issue from technological feasibility but as a matter of ontology. Is it possible for any “conscious” organism to perceive the “consciousness” of any other?

I conclude these by stating that Narcissus as an installation emerges as a set of properties, an assemblage, a behaviour of a whole, which cannot be reduced to any of its parts. In the same way I would like to assure that as a model of a complex set of interrelated things, each with diverse properties and potentials, NarcissUs is a metaphor of humanity, and its behaviour and process of discovery of behaviour. Therefore NarcissUs serves as a metaphoric feedback loop which has an inherent similitude to us, which awakes the attention, curiosity and empathy of the visitor.

Visitor "Kate" interacting with NarcissUs, GAMeC, July 2016

Behind the work: randomness, machine learning, feedback loops, emergence and recursion

NarcissUs is an installation which uses mixed media, including algorithms and techniques for face recognition and face tracking. It integrates an algorithm for machine learning, a virtual 3D model with detailed muscular information and a video camera pointing at a motorised mirror, which is placed in front of the LCD screen where the facial image is displayed. The motorised mirror helps the camera to look at the reflected face or to look for faces in the surrounding space.

It is a machine-learning setup in a mixed media environment. It integrates elements within the virtual reality, such as a human-face model, with elements from the material reality such as a motorised mirror. This combination of elements opens a door to a third space composed by abstract elements and processes, which allow the emergence of perception-feedback loops.

On the virtual side an expression-able 3D Model of a human face is displayed on a screen and is provided with agency by connecting it to the reality through a camera and a facial-expression recognition algorithm. On the side of the material reality a mirror is placed in front of the camera and the display, where NarcissUs exists as an image. This reflective device is attached to a motor with the purpose of providing NarcissUs with the possibility of searching for faces in its surroundings. The rotation of the motor is regulated by the same algorithm in charge of facial expression recognition, meaning that the search will stop at the moment NarcissUs finds a face.

NarcissUs at Kasko, Wartek, Basel, March 2016

NarcissUs looks at itself and constantly intends to copy its own expressions, falling continuously in erratic or contingent states. NarcissUs learning process is driven by the necessity of reducing stress to the motor and to stand still. The learning engine is written in Java and it is based on the deep learning and reinforcement algorithms.

The human face model, the expression control and the basic decision algorithms are driven by Unity 3D Engine and are written in C# and JavaScript. FaceOSC is an open source algorithm based on Jason Saragih’s Face Tracker Algorithm, which is in charge of the face tracking and expression recognition. An electronic Micro-controller known as Arduino is used to drive the motor which controls the mirror rotation through serial communication.

Technically it consists of a feedback loop between a computer generated portrait with detailed facial musculature, a camera, a motorised mirror, a face tracking algorithm and an evolving learning machine seeking for faces.

The system behind NarcissUs searches through the camera a face in the mirrored image or in the surroundings. When a face is recognised and engaged the system learns from it and evolves through expressive exchanges. If a face cannot be tracked, the system will use the motion of the mirror to help the camera to see beyond its frontal range of view.

The facial model is a detailed 3D scan of a real person. The scan was done with a 3D Infrared Camera and additional software was used in order to also reconstruct the corresponding musculature and topology of the scanned face. The reconstructed of the facial muscles is information which allows to handle certain control points of the 3D Mesh in order to manipulate the shape and the motion of the specific areas of the facial model. Variables such as mouth aperture, lip crunching, left eye blinking, left eye-brow lifting, and so on, can be parametric affected by an algorithm.

Figure 12. Technical Representation of NarcissUs as presented in 2016

On the tracking side Open CV algorithms are used in order to allow narcissus to track faces and recognise specific gestures. A dedicated library and framework has been built by Kyle McDonald which is called FaceOSC. This library allows to track faces and reconstruct in real time a low resolution polygonal mesh of the tracked face consisting of over sixty points. The mesh is used as three dimensional set and from its analysis simplified data with numerical values such as eye openness, face rotation, and so on is generated. CV stands for computer vision. Open CV is an open source framework which is continuously updated by a community of computer scientists, programmers and media artists. It is a library or compilation of libraries available in multiple platforms and programming languages, which allows to make use of the state of the art algorithms for image tracking and image recognition, as well as machine learning.

The tracked information is used in order to manipulate the parameters of the reconstructed facial musculature which finally allows NarcissUs to mimic facial expressions. NarcissUs can either track any real face in the real space or track its own face through the mirror located in front of the display and the camera. Additionally, the mirror is provided with rotation capabilities driven by a servo-motor which is at the same time connected to a micro controller which is regulated by the algorithm through serial communication. This allows the camera to see and look for faces through the reflected images in a range of 180º.

Recursion as briefly introduced before through the interpration from Morin’s diagrams and ideas, is understood as the definition of a process in terms of its own derived processes or products. The concept of recursion is an abstraction of the repetition within repetition which is present in the world, in nature and in phsychic and cognitive processes such as perception, language and thought.

In order to understand the purpose of the presented installation is necessary to grasp the role of the observer in the different levels in which the installation exists and behave. It is also important to remark the role that recurrence plays inside the physical system and the algorithmic structure that controls it.

The role from the visitor at the installation is as necessary as it is not. NarcissUs can mimic the gesture of any person standing in front of the camera or any person who get caught by the camera through the rotated reflected image visible through the mirror. Nevertheless the experience for the visitor variates considerably depending on which kind of participation she / he has over the installation.

It can be considered that they differentiate as passive, active and null modes of participation. Passive occurs when the visitor gets caught by the rotating mirror. Active participation occurs when the visitor disrupts between NarcissUs and its reflection and gets control over it. Null participation is when the visitor neither get tracked through the mirror nor stands in front of the camera, but only observes NarcissUs interact with itself.

The behaviour of NarcissUs also diverges and evolves differently depending on the acquired facial information it gets, either from the visitors irrupting in the environment or purely from its own reflected image. The first displays a faster growing behaviour curve towards richer and variated expressions while The second arouses a behaviour which smoothly grows from a quite to further more chaotic states.

The following diagram explains how the learning algorithm behind NarcissUs behaves. As it is an open system, which enables at each step of the programm to integrate to the behaviour of the model any new information , under the condition that if a face is being tracked, the system will be enabled to increment the variability of tracked actions by means of a combination between the repeated gestures and de newly tracked and learned ones. Variability is also increased thanks to the shift in time between the crossing signals (mirror and face).

Figure 13. Learning process inside NarcissUs Algorithm and Physical Set Up

Anyhow, the topic of emergence is highly discussed. Some thinkers argue that emergence lacks of any philosophical value, due to a certain wrongly atributed mysticism. It is important to recognize and also recalling the ideas from DeLanda, that there is nothing mystical behind emgergence. It is rather the interaction of entities within a whole, those which reveal the occluded potentials of things which end up enabling the emergence and in a way facilitate the individuation process, each time they manifest together.

Individuality therefore manifest transiently as stations in the processes and reactions on the path of becoming. Becoming is to get somewhere new, and to be trapped in a perpetual process of individuation and change.

NarcissUs "N" and the Mirror "M" are not fixed. N and M change through time, they are unique stations on the path of becoming

Figure 14. Explaining Individuation and Emergence behind NarcissUs

Randomness refers to the uncertainty of knowing how events will ocurr within patterns. At the same time it does mean that patterns are not infinite, but hardly constrained by all those things a pattern cannot be. How real randomness can be real when certain constrains are given? What is real randomness in the world? In the same way these two questions remain unsolvable I would like to point the similar interrogation in terms of emergence. How from providing a defined set of let us say two entities, which together build up a certain whole, can real emergence throw out results beyond the sum of the potentials of both? The truth is there cannot be emergence without unexpected results and unexpected states would not be feasible if emergence was not an inherent property of complexity.