Digital Mask: Reflection on AI Face Changing and Disembodied Communication from the Perspective of Belting's "Image Embodiment"
Abstract
Interpersonal communication is a type of communication-based on body images. In the age of social media, the change of image media from the body to the electronic screen affects the characteristics of facial imaging and people's cognition of communication objects. With the support of digital technology, facial images have undergone a dynamic process of production, separation, and presence, forming a faceless digital mask, which provides the possibility for the separation and free combination of face and body in interpersonal communication. Based on Hans Belting's analysis of the relationship between body image, media, and body in "image anthropology", this paper discusses the pasteurization, disembodiment, and initialization of faces by AI face-changing technology and the alienation of AI face-changing to interpersonal communication in virtual space.
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