@facetinction | A (con)temporary portrait.

Loss of quality, as well as the alienation of a picture, are the consequences of a process called algorithmic compression; in this case, caused by repeatedly uploading and screenshotting. The deformation becomes more and more visible with every picture. This leads to the question of what will remain of our digital data, with the ever-growing amount of file formats not being supported anymore. Even now artificial intelligence is able to search through the Cloud and sort pictures by certain keywords and to distinguish people as well as objects. This is just the beginning, for sure.

However, what I am concerned about the most is the way of how our society treats images, the way how people present themselves and how they conform to the guidelines - making themselves "instagrammable" and changing their appearance.

By doing this we delete our identity from our faces and the aspect which makes us unique. Not existing faces are created – instead, some that already exist are arranged to fit. The future will bring computer-generated influences who analyse trends and use this data to create content. Right now companies are working on an AI which can detect so-called "Deepfakes" from real faces. Deepfakes describe seemingly realistic content that has been altered by artificial intelligence.

Personally, this project is relevant in many different ways: the usage of digital data online as well as offline and the enormous amount of pictures made within the blink of an eye. How wrong use of social media can have an impact on our well-being and our appearance, all the way to supervision day and night and facial recognition, how people from China know first-hand.

I uploaded the images on January 1st, 2020 during different times of the day. This is only the case in one time zone – just like a puzzle. By doing this I would like to include the big aspect of globalization and connection in my work.

In sooner times, speaking "face to face" played a huge role. Today one could speak of "face to display through algorithm". The same way that machines were brought in to replace the manual work in the 19th century, digitalization is now replacing mental work.