Melita Dahl

Melita Dahl is a visual artist based in Australia. She is currently completing her PhD at the Australian National University through the Photography and Media Arts workshop. Previously, she completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM), Cologne, Germany.

Melita’s work has been shown in prestigious museums, galleries, festivals, theatres and art fairs within Australia and Europe: the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Canberra, the Sydney Opera House, the Hamburger Bahnhof (Museum of the Present) in Berlin, and the Deutsches Museum in Munich. It is also represented by major Australian public art and private collections. Melita’s collaborative work extends to working with artists from a range of disciplines to produce interdisciplinary works or digital stage design for theatrical performances.

Melita’s current practice-led research is a cross-disciplinary investigation into fine-art portraiture, the photographic image and the field of affective computing. Her current focus is on commercial Face Expression Recognition (FER) technologies and applications that attempt to detect human emotion or type. She experiments with and explores photographic portraiture with the aid of these tools, as a response to the deployment of FER technologies in public spaces and private contexts, such as in schools and shopping malls.

Melita’s second research project draws on the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) of Australia’s photographic collection. The photographic portraits become a dataset for a “hybrid” data visualisation, which visually and contextually filters and sorts the collection according to metadata derived from an FER tool and the NPG website. The resulting prototypes classify and arrange the NPG photographic portrait collection according to pose and expression, in particular the Deadpan expression.