We often think of digital media as substitutions for face-to-face interaction. To discuss new media inter-facial encounters is to interrogate the binary supposition that the face as new media image is in opposition to the embodied, biological face. Yet, as feminist and critical posthumanism has taught us, there are no autonomous humans and machines. Ambient technological systems are busy constructing our faces all the time; humans, in Barad's words, are entangled, lacking an ‘independent self-contained existence’. Whether on Facebook and Snapchat, at airports or traffic stops, biometric facial recognition is an indelible part of software in everyday life. As Sarah Kember notes, ambient facial recognition technologies implicate new media modes of surveillance in vernacular new media culture; such ‘systems normalize and naturalize a culture in which the joint operation of marketing and surveillance is becoming dominant’. The artist Zach Blas has called this contemporary vernacular our ‘Global Face Culture’. Global face culture is exemplified by ‘biometrics and facial detection technologies’, as well as popular modes of facial expression, such as selfies. The personalised new media face culture of social media is an effect of ‘ever obsessive and paranoid impulses to know, capture, calculate, categorize, and standardize human faces’. As Blas suggests, global face culture is ‘explosive and emergent’, and so ‘the very meaning of a face – what it is, does, and communicates – is continuously redefined’.

In this article, we contribute to thinking about the emergence of the face in digital culture. Building on work in the fields of art history, cinema studies, media studies and surveillance studies, which have long established a technological interest in the human face, we move this critical discourse on by locating in contemporary popular culture, and Hollywood narrative cinema in particular, anxieties about, and play with, the face as a new kind of digital object. Much film studies and cinema theory has been invested in the significance of the face as seen on screen, and in particular on the close-up – on the tension between the narrative and abstract signification of a cut-up, blown up face-image. While the close-up is not always of a face, as Mary Ann Doane argues, ‘the face is indissociably linked with the process of effacement, a move beyond codification’ – a function of the close-up.