A study on the possibility of combining the dismantlement of faciality with digital character creation: Focusing on the 'Art Brut' of Jean Dubuffet

Abstract

This paper examines the possibility that the discourse of dismantlement of faciality can be combined with character creation in the digital age by analyzing the facial images in Jean Dubuffet's Art Brut painting focusing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of 'faciality'. According to Deleuze, the face is a layer of linguistic expression deterritorialized from the body, and it is the mechanism of faciality that fixes humans to signifiance and subjectification by a single code that dominates Western civilization. This paper attempts to capture the prototype of the face that the mechanism of faciality do not penetrate through the raw image of faces in Art Brut, which breaks down the classical representation system. These informel faces of Art Brut and Deleuze's undecidable faces suggest the possibility of various expressions of face and body images through the undecidability between faciality and body, and the relationship with material objects. In other words, the deconstruction of faciality as claimed in this paper can open the infinite possibilities of creating digital characters with another vitality as a new approach to face representation.