Automatic faces: The transcendent visage of trans-humanity

Over the past decade, we have witnessed a fundamental rethinking and extension of the category of “human” within the semiosphere of most cultures. On the one hand, this has occurred through the critique of anthropocentrism in relation to the ethics of the human-nature relationship (with the emblematic cases of sustainable development and vegetarianism as a cruelty-free lifestyle). On the other hand, we have become increasingly accustomed to qualitative interactions with anthropomorphic nonhuman agents (from Metahumans to ChatGPT), and we are continuously exposed to narratives in which androids and robots are increasingly difficult to classify as nonhumans. This last aspect is the one we will focus on in this work and with a particular attention to digital games which, from the point of view of both interactions with AI and of their stories are perhaps the most iconic example of such conceptual reorganization. The reflection on the contemporary resemantization of the human in the light of digital creation and manipulation of faces will be done in this chapter through the case study of the video game NieR: Automata (Square Enix 2017) and by devoting special attention to the comparison between the faces and visages of its androids, robots, and drones. To do so, we will begin with a brief exposition of the general plot of NieR: Automata in the first section, summarizing the main events and highlighting story elements that challenge the distinction between humans and machines. In the second section we will analyze separately the faces of the game’s three protagonist figures: androids, biomachines (robots), and pods (drones). We will thus see how these three different faces of the mechanical can take on a “personality” and become expressions of humanity in three different ways: through resemblance-identification, ambiguity, and projection. This analysis will allow us, in the third and final part, to come to two conclusions. The first will concern the rhetorical use of the face to convey the values of transhumanist narratives and undermine some of the key twentieth-century cultural distinctions. The second will concern the role of digital technology and in particular of digital faces in rethinking the human and the subject in a transcendental, ergative, and supra-individual sense.