02_Plano Afectivo / Exhibition

Deslave galería /
Tijuana / 2018

Flat Affect (Plano afectivo) is an exhibition that explores the ethics and aesthetics of empathy through the design and production of smiles. Based on concepts and dental design techniques from smile design, the work carries a speculative methodology, a sort of future archeology that delves into the ruins of the present. The narrative is set against a landscape in which emotion and empathy become a technological extension, and where the body is a quantifiable enterprise molded by hyperreality.

Carrillo’s work mainly crosses two parallel lines of thought: the leading role of digital images in the medical industry —not only as representations, but as tools that operate onto reality—, as well as the capitalist dynamics that transform, among other things, body and healthcare into commodified goods.

Jens Eder and Charlotte Klank give us an account of the way images operate upon the world in Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict (2017, Manchester University Press), and the three ways in which they actively infer from the world: As part of a machine operation, as a motivation for a social group to take action, and as a means of manipulation of affects and thoughts.

Regarding the research that lies at the center of Flat Affect, these operative images are found on multiple levels of the medical industry, specifically in the dental health services, aiding to construct the perception of the body and its health, while also participating in the construction of desire. Through her work, Carrillo triggers the agency of the medical / aesthetic industry by setting it against a technological reality such as Faception. A company that claims to predict, reveal and catalog someone’s personality solely through an image. Corrective prostheses modify, quantify and optimize the smile when responding to these technologies creating a language that incorporates both an ancestral form of knowledge and a current one. This future archeology collapses time to weave a past that seems distant — the Totonaca pre hispanic culture with its smiley faces— with the future of facial recognition and the possible emotional and physiological changes this technology could encite. The digital image with all its complex processes becomes indispensable in this flow of information, desire and capital, but its always in response to a symptomatic condition propelled by late capitalism. We create images to modify the body, and we modify the body to create images. The acceleration and feedback between flesh, pixel and currency becomes indistinguishable.