Happy faces are everywhere—in commercials, on billboards, in Hollywood movies. Cheese provides a glimpse behind the mask of this seemingly ubiquitous joviality.

The impetus to produce Cheese came from the relentlessly friendly smiling faces of the entertainment industry. Before a rolling camera, six actresses tried to smile as long as possible—up to an hour and a half. Each of these extended smiles was simultaneously monitored by a computerised perception system; as soon as the acted-out friendliness sank below a certain level, an alarm signal was triggered as a means of prompting the actress to put a bit more sincerity into her performance.

Cheese is a staging of a form of human-computer interaction in which the computer plays the lead part. The actresses’ very real emotional uneasiness—which they are able to conceal by means of convincing jobs of acting—comes across only during the breaks that are necessary to relax their strained facial features.

Programming: Sean Crowe, Models: Melissa Berger, Laura Clumeck, Natasha Desai, Kyra Locke, Susan Marshall, Cameo Cara Martine

Others include Pierre Moreels, Pietro Perona, Javier Movellan, Marni Bartlett, CALTECH, California Institute of Technology, Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering, Pasadena and the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California San Diego’s Institute for Neural Computation.

Christian Möller (Germany, 1959) studied architecture at the College of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt and as a scholarship holder under Gustav Peichel at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1990 he founded his own architect\'s office and media laboratory in Frankfurt . Since September 2001, he has joined the Department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA, Los Angeles, as a senior faculty.

http://www.christian-moeller.com/

Sean Crowe (USA)