Face Act from Pia Lindman on Vimeo.

At first, while I watched Pia Lindman’s “Face Act” at Gallery Diet this morning, I felt a little grumpy — the way I do whenever visual artists stray into the performing arts without a clue about what has been done better and before. Plus, I had a long chat with Lindman earlier this week, and fell in love with the back story. But there was no hint of the back story in the presentation. Then I realized I was missing the point.

In “Face Act,” Lindman sits in a chair while other people read a text she did not write and still other people manipulate her expressions: one person lifts an eyebrow; another pulls down the corner of her mouth; and so on, until she has an expression to match the text.

Lindman is interested in gesture and authenticity. During a residency at MIT, she observed scientists programming robots to exhibit human emotion through the mechanical movement of their facial features. Robot sees a friendly face. Robot smiles.

After seeing the mechanical parts behind the robot mask, Lindman wanted to apply it to her own face — to let the software manipulate her. She soon realized that was a good way to poke her eyes out. Then she thought she’d build a gizmo to fit her face, but that proved unfeasible. So she hit on a “low-tech” solution: she hired acting students at MIT to push and pull her features with their fingers.

Amid the Greater Art Basel madness, Lindman reprises her performance with a trio of visual art students who attack her face to express the comments posted on art critic Jerry Saltz’s Facebook group Seeing Out Loud. With the help of her collaborators, Lindman looks disgusted at the tax dollars wasted on artists, incredulous that anyone could make such an argument, idealistic about the impact of art, and so on.

So why was I grumpy? First I thought those drama students at MIT probably did a better job than the visual art students in matching text to expression. This is basically just an acting exercise, I thought.

And watching the performance live at Diet or the video of the MIT, no one would know the cool back story about the robots. Where are the robots?

But as I watched the student artists clumsily poking and prodding at the performing artist’s face, I realized that Lindman was not trying to hide artifice but expose it. Actors try to hide their emotions; Lindman ripped off the dramatic mask. And underneath skin, eyes, smile, we are the robots.

Pia Lindman performs “Face Act” again at 3pm on December 5, 2009 at Gallery Diet, 174 NW 23 Street, Miami, FL 33127; 305-571-2288; gallerydiet.com.