Massimo, you have been a Fellow at HIAS in Hamburg since September. To kick things off, you have put together a small interactive exhibition for the Hamburg public entitled «Facets of the Face», which shows what you and your international team have been researching on for the past five years. You made it clear how ubiquitous facial recognition through AI is already in our lives — irritations included…

The face is something commonplace — and mysterious at the same time. In the exhibition, we wanted to de-familiarize people from their own faces, i.e. from something they think they know very well. We wanted to encourage them to think about what constitutes their face and what has been lost in the excessive use of the face through digital technology. At the same time, we didn’t just want to scare them, but also give them hope for the future.

Your research project on the topic of «The meaning of the face in the digital age» is global in scope. What specific insights do you hope to gain from your research in Germany — and Hamburg?

The topic of the face and artificial intelligence is viewed differently depending on society, history and culture. In Germany, there is a particular sensitivity to the collection of data. It is a country that pays great attention to the issue of data protection and privacy. That’s why I want to investigate how people here relate to AI and facial recognition. Hamburg is a metropolis, and I am curious to see how privacy, ethical standards, and traditions can be reconciled with the use of digital technologies in this setting. My research in Hamburg is part of a comparative study that will lead to a larger publication. Another German reference for us as a comparatively small city is Freiburg.

You also teach and conduct research in Shanghai. How do you experience control there with the help of AI?

Facial recognition is omnipresent there. It’s clear that it’s a massive surveillance operation because all this data could be used by government forces. However, there is another aspect that we in the West often don’t realize. The face in China, unlike in Western societies, is not a strong expression of uniqueness — the social face is more important than the physical face. An interesting example of this was the use of masks during the pandemic. Unlike in Western societies, their use was uncontroversial in Japan, Korea or China. These countries have different political systems, but they have a very similar understanding of the position of the individual in society. So if you wear a mask in China, it’s not because you want to protect yourself from others, but because you want to protect others from yourself. Knowing this is important for understanding how AI is used in China. And it is also important to know that the significance of new technologies in Southeast Asia is different from ours, which also has to do with religious attitudes. A Buddhist, for example, has no problem with new technology; it manifests itself as a religious force in Buddhist understanding.

How important are your own impressions when you explore a foreign city?

They are fundamental. One of my first activities is to walk around and look for faces in the streetscape — how and where there are faces and how they are represented. We take faces in the cityscape for granted, but in cities in North Africa or cities that are deeply influenced by Islamic culture, you will hardly see faces because in these traditions the representation of the human body is not taken lightly. We take for granted that our heroes are represented sculpturally as statues, but this concept does not exist in Islamic civilizations. We, on the other hand, represent everything with a face, because Christianity manifests itself in incarnation, and this has a face.

And what is your attitude to your own face?

I realize how unrecognizable our face is to ourselves. We can only visually perceive our face indirectly: in the mirror, in pictures or in movies. Although the face has been the most important link in social interaction since we were born, we have to accept that this interface remains hidden from us. Although our face is so important, we ourselves do not know it.