Selected Publications
- LEONE, Massimo (2022) “Post-Structuralist Semiotics: A Reading”, 109-128. In Pelkey, Jamin, ed. 2021. Bloomsbury Semiotics: A Major Reference Work in Four Volumes, 4 vols; vol. 1: “History and Semiosis”. London and New York: Bloomsbury; ISBN: 9781350139442
- LEONE, Massimo (2023) “The Spiral of Digital Falsehood in Deepfakes”, 385-405. The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 36; first published online on 19 January 2023; Electronic ISSN 1572-8722; Print ISSN 0952-8059; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-09970-5
- LEONE, Massimo and Marco VIOLA, eds (2022) What’s so Special About Faces? Visages at the Crossroad Between Philosophy, Semiotics and Cognition, special issue of Topoi, 41, 4 September. Dordrecht: Springer; ISSN: 1572-8749
- LEONE, Massimo (2022) “Visage Mathematics: Semiotic Ideologies of Facial Measurement and Calculus”, 1-26. In Danesi, Marcel, ed. (2022) Handbook of Cognitive Mathematics. Cham (CH): Springer; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44982-7_48-1
- LEONE, Massimo (2022) “Semioethics of the Visual Fake”, 187-205. In Andina, Tiziana and Dreier, Thomas, eds (2022) Digital Ethics: The Issue of Images (book series “Bild und Recht”, 5). Baden-Baden: NOMOS; ISBN: 978-3-8487-8841-5
FRIAS Projects
Envisaging the City: An Interdisciplinary Study of Digital Urban ‘Facescapes’ (2023-2024)
The project proposes a roadmap for studying the impact of digital technology and artificial intelligence on the presence and meaning of human faces in contemporary cities, with specific attention to the cultural, social, and economic role of automatic facial identification and recognition, facial big data, and the possibility to generate photo-realistic images of human faces through generative adversarial networks and other algorithms of artificial intelligence. The roadmap situates such inquiry within the study of the long-term relation between cities and faces, in all their multiple facets and manifestations. Investigation in this domain is expected to cast new light on how this fundamental affordance of social interaction, the face, and this essential cradle of human coexistence, the city, are modified after the advent of the digital representation of the face. The planned result is a detailed analysis of contemporary “facescapes”, that is, ways in which human faces are turned into support for technological exchange and communicative capital in present-day cities, with specific attention to global urban hubs.
Transhuman Portraits: Artificial Faces in Art, Science, and Society (2020-2021)
The idea of facial images made by a non-human agency is old. On the one hand, human beings are neuro-physiologically inclined to pareidolia, that is, the tendency to see faces in natural environments (tree-trunks and clouds, for instance); on the other hand, ancient sources in many cultures narrate of images of faces prodigiously appearing in stones, gems, landscapes, etc. In religion too, deities are often thought to manifest themselves through miraculous facial images, called “acheiropoietai”. The project will survey this fascinating tradition and compare it with current trends in the creation of “transhuman portraits”: in technology, through generative adversarial networks and in robotics; in medicine, through aesthetic surgery and face transplantation; in the arts, with special attention to the provocative creation of “artificial faces” by contemporary digital artists like Leonardo Selvaggio.