My Guess? The Nixon Mask Was Inside Out.

 Sometimes youtube's suggestions algorithm absolutely nails it. There was no way I wasn't going to click on a video called Bob Newhart & the Masked Doctor Who Cured the Gays. Although a possible inspiration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface, this masked doctor in question is the far more benign John E. Fryer, M.D., a closeted member of the American Pyschological Association at a time when homosexuality was listed as a mental illness. In 1972 he was persuaded to finally propose its delisting at the annual meeting of the APA in a speech entitled "I Am A Homosexual", which he delivered on the condition that he was allowed to do so in disguise.

 

 "Dr H. Anonymous" to the left of the campaigners who convinced him to make this address: Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny. (Source).
 

  Fryer wore a velvet tuxedo, a large curly wig, and what was reported to be a mask of Richard Nixon, and the "Cure" of the video's title is the subsequent delisting of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. That "&" is doing quite a but of heavy lifting, but Bob Newhart was the star of a popular sitcom at the time about a psychiatrist, which in 1976 decided it too should probably take a stand. Since the recommendation of this video I've been for a delightfully deep dive into Matt Baume's channel and it's interesting to note how much more progressive television shows seem in the seventies than in the decade that follows, despite the continuity of creative teams behind them. Things don't always slowly get fairer then. Often they get fairer, then get pushed back. But I don't want to bang on about the eighties.

Further Gaze-Returning Technology, from Behnaz Farahi

 A few years before Disney's chastely fleshless skullbot, the LA-based Iranian artist Behnaz Farahi designed a less humanoid but also far sexier eye-contact-responsive item called "The Caress of the Gaze". It was admittedly designed to be worn by probably quite a sexy human. Most fashion is. According to this article, a camera beneath the top's mesh of quills registers not only whether or not the model is being looked at, but also the gender of the onlooker, and potentially even their age, possibly to stop the piece responding too sexily. Seduction doesn't seem to be the point of the piece however, so much as the creation of an article of clothing that can respond involuntarily to its wearer's environment, both physical and social, like hairs rising on a second skin. This is almost the exact opposite of the intention behind Farahi's most recent piece, and the piece that introduced me to her:

 Taking its title from an article by Giyatri Spivak, "Can The Subaltern Speak?" is a work about not being looked at. The Barandi masks that inspired it were said to have been worn as a protest against Portuguese colonists. Its eyelashes flutter not in response to the male gaze, but to communicate in a secret language, like the American soldier who blinked TORTURE in morse code while filmed hostage in Viet Nam. As Farahi herself explains however, it is not in fact the wearers of these masks who will be communicating with each other in this language, but the masks...