#recognizability

I'm gonna assume going out in public would be difficult no matter your form, seeing as you're pretty.. popular, let's say, with the aurors and stuff?

There are downsides, yes - my recognizability the first and foremost. Even in a situation where I had won - well, Lord Voldemort just popping into the bookshop would still create a bit of a stir, no? That is the burden with such notoriety.

Yes, I can and do disguise myself. But it is tiring.

My sensitivity to cold is also a downside to this new form. As are the general downsides to having a body in general; the ability to become ill, or physically injured, or to have a rotating array of needs in the form of hunger, thirst, exhaustion.

Carrilho, A., 2010. Vladimir Putin. [image] Available at: <https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrecarrilho/5068677011/in/album-72157630142450982> [Accessed 6 April 2020].

This artwork is significant in the way the combination of visual elements is composed to make up the absence of background or storytelling. The digital textures in this work create their own pattern which does not require an additional layer of information, because it would be too noisy to notice the subtle proportions. 

The overall shape of the figure is simplistic and has no connection to the person portrayed. Usually with a caricature art the initial proportions are manipulated to absurd and can keep the recognizability of a certain person. Here, the main means of detecting the character are the facial features. The structure of the head is heavily simplified, keeping the essence. It is also influenced by the nose which together with the eyes and the proportion between them makes 80% of the recognizability. The face could be replaced, and there would not be enough evidence to find the reference to the initial person. Hence, the actual facial details and their proportion have the biggest impact in portraying a particular person.

I relished the anonymity I found when I first came to school. However, familiarity began to creep as soon as I noticed its absence.

Background figures–silhouettes in storefronts–have developed personalities and backstories, and sometimes I think that the progression of my own life is nothing but an authorship fleshing out the characters who lurk in deep pages. The doorman at the newspaper reads my articles and comments on them as I stand in the lobby for the elevator. The handsome young man who works at the pizza place I frequent always asks me where I’ve been, as though it were an offense not to show up there on a daily basis. “¿Hablas español?” he asked me one night. I said I was learning. “Te enseñamos aquí.”

I’m tempted to view life as a story, and it’s somewhat disconcerting to realize that I am nothing but a character in other people’s lives, as well. It was two years ago now, but I remember Caroline telling me that you don’t like people, you like what they represent to you, or the purpose they serve to you. It’s a drastic oversimplification, but I find myself reflecting on the different players on my stage: the best friend, the pen pal, the first love, and so on.

In the opposite manner, I’ve always looked at fictional characters as their own people. I have this sense that a Jane Eyre actually did fall in love with Mr. Rochester once upon a time, and maybe Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost still does haunt visitors at an estate somewhere in England.

I like the Aristotelian idea of life as a narrative, and I like when characters are aware of the nature of their existence. (Call me pretentious but I’m taking Western Civ right now and I love this shit.) It’s like that book Sophie’s World, which I found to be extremely disturbing when I first read it. And this is such a recurring theme across Shakespeare: the scrivener pops into Richard III to comment on the mutability of history, Horatio survives Hamlet to tell the tale, plays are constructed within plays, “all the world’s a stage,” “long live this, and this gives life to thee.” I could talk about this for hours. But it’s the idea of this metaphysical awareness of characters, actors, fiction, reality, if this makes any sense at all.

I’m sorry for the literary digression. I’m skeptical of solipsism, but I know that we are all stuck in our own narratives, from our own points of view, in our own bodies. So when a girl I didn’t recognize yelled “Abby!” at me as I biked past her on 4th St., I was struck by the realization that I am just a character to her, as much as she is just a blank page to me. I entered her narrative briefly, on a borrowed fixie, wearing a goofy helmet, only to disappear again behind a corner.

In a way, being recognized is more frightening than being forgotten or altogether unknown. But I think there’s comfort in the overarching theme that life is just a story, make of it what you will, and all that counts is what you leave behind.

[...]

To frame the frame seems to involve a certain highly reflexive overlay of the visual field, but, in my view, this does not have to result in rarified forms of reflexivity. On the contrary, to call the frame into question is to show that the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn, that something was already outside, which made the very sense of the inside possible, recognizable. The frame never quite determined precisely what it is we see, think, recognize, and apprehend. Something exceeds the frame that troubles our sense of reality; in other words, something occurs that does not conform to our established understanding of things."

How then is recognizability understood? In the first instance, it is not a quality or potential of individual humans. . . . The point, however, will be ask how such norms operate to produce certain subjects as 'recognizable' persons and to make others decidedly more difficult to recognize. The problem is not merely how to include more people within existing norms, but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially."