// new media class

Images of powerful Faces – national heroes, military leaders, founding fathers, and conquerors – have been printed on money in a continuing tradition to showcase their importance. Face Value on money refers to the apparent worth printed or depicted by assigning value to objects so as to be used to purchase any number of goods. The Face Value, thus, isn't associated with the pecking order of power each Face has.

Faces have been a means to detect fake bills because of the extraordinarily well-developed ability of humans to process, recognise and extract information from them.

Zoom is a Face-centric communication tool. When the camera is off, the dynamics between participants are undermined to an extreme. On the other hand, the Face can itself be used as the source for a dataset. All superficial data implied by users in digital communication can be capitalised to be invested or used for a business. Machine learning takes everything at Face Value. This phenomenon is pervasive in digital communication by willingness of participation, reinforced paradoxically by a compulsory agreement overwhelmed by the pandemic and the system.

The project titled "Face Value" aims to expose the fact that Face has become the capital as such that can create services, beyond the medium that maintains the existing order of the system healthy. The machine that has learned a set of Faces and corresponding Face Values from a total of 315 banknotes recognises the Faces participating in a Zoom meeting. The most analogous Face Values pop reactively and algorithmically up on them by impulse to judge things by their immediate appearance.*

*transmediale 2018 face value, https://web.archive.org/web/20210222214933/https://archive.transmediale.de/de/program/text/face-value