First presentation of trAIts | l'Homme Moyen at the international meeting Faces and Machine Vision: Public Conversations on Facial AI and Society, on facial AI, surveillance and digital governance, organised by the fAIces project (Facial Recognition Technologies: Etho-Assemblages and Alternative Futures, CIES-Iscte) at Iscte, Lisbon, on 4 November 2026.
The session followed the three acts of the work. Before the interaction came the context: the difference between identifying and inferring, two centuries of measuring bodies and faces, from Bertillon, Galton and Quetelet to Lavater, Gall, Lombroso and Camper, Max Factor's Beauty Micrometer and the questions machine learning has asked again since 2008. Then the camera measured the faces of volunteers from the audience and built the room's homme moyen. Finally, with the report on screen, came the reveal of what had been measured, invented and fabricated, and what became of the old and new claims.
Nothing was kept after the session except screenshots of the final report, for documentation. The faces of the audience are blurred in the photographs.
Download the presentation (PDF, 14 pages)
Source: fAIces – Facial Recognition Technologies: Etho-Assemblages and Alternative Futures
Photographs by Hugo Cruz.
The session's report
