Dear Jana,

We have never met in person and can only get an idea of what we each look like thanks to the photos that a Google search yields, from social media and from a conversation we had via Zoom. It’s a similar story with many of the contacts we have today. This sheds light on what has changed in recent years due to digitalisation and the internet. In the past, if you didn’t know someone personally, you usually didn’t know what they looked like, even if you had written to them or read their texts. So pictures and especially pictures of people have become much more present and thus much more important. But it also always matters how these pictures are taken, who takes them and who decides when and where they are published. Only in our present day does self-determination mean not least self-determination over one’s own image.

Of course, digitalisation also means that the possibilities for creating photographic images have expanded enormously. Self-determination over one’s own image therefore also means, above all, self-design of one’s own image. Unlike in the past, you no longer have to fatalistically accept a picture, but can either edit it or take further pictures quickly and without additional costs. And above all, unlike in earlier times, you can take the pictures yourself, you can even take selfies and are therefore not dependent on third parties and their view from the outside.

In the same way, however, digitalisation means that ever more powerful techniques of identification and thus also of surveillance are being developed and that photos of faces in particular are the focus of automated recognition software. On the one hand, it is now possible to change one’s own face at will and to use filters and apps to stage it differently again and again within seconds, even to convert the same photo depending on the addressee or context. On the other hand, one has to reckon with the fact that every portrait published online is fed into programmes designed to compare it with millions of other portraits, to measure and classify it according to various criteria and to assign it as clearly as possible. The data obtained in this way is sold to companies, mostly for advertising purposes, but there is always the danger that it will fall into the wrong hands or that politically extremist forces will gain access to it and thus be able to blackmail and persecute their opponents. For this reason, it is not just a matter of enjoying the transformation, or even of curiosity about experiments, when people digitally edit photos of their own faces. Rather, in increasing numbers, they are also following the need to elude those facial recognition programmes and to hide themselves with the help of image editing apps.

While there have been forms of masking at almost all times and in almost all cultures, it seems to me that in recent years they have experienced a historically unparalleled boom. For masks allow both, indeed they have always had precisely these two functions: self-determined shaping of the face and resistance against too much visibility. One could also say: if masking was already important in the analogue public space, either to make one’s own social role more visible and to define it more clearly or to camouflage it, it becomes existential in the digital public space. For those who are not concerned about their own image in two respects, i.e. who neither strive for a concise staging nor exercise caution towards unprotected visibility, are also endangered in two respects: On the one hand, with too lax and unspecific ways of self-fashioning, one is quickly lost in the competition for attention, gets fewer ‘likes’ and comments and is disadvantaged by the algorithms of the platforms. And on the other hand, you then risk becoming the compliant object of those who want to monitor and control other people at every turn.

In other respects, too, the digital public space, as it emerges above all within social media, follows its own rules. Since almost everything leaves traces in it and is stored and evaluated, it is riskier than analogue public space. Even years later, an old file or a photo posted in a remote location suddenly turns up and can be used against you. On the other hand, the digital public space seems safer and freer because it does not require the physical presence of the actors and it is easier to hide behind staging. Although there is always the threat of shitstorms and hate comments, one is less likely to be exposed to real physical violence.

These specific characteristics of digital public space favour strong and unusual forms of masking. Those who mask themselves often, always differently and with creative energy can better cover traces, but above all try out forms of self-dramatisation that would not be possible in analogue public space. Because there, especially people from minorities – for example members of the LGBTQ+ movement – still experience a lot of aggression as soon as they express their feelings and convictions. They are freer in the digital public space, can also network better in it and become a community whose members mutually empower each other. In fact, empowerment has only become a successful and dominant concept in the digital public space! Moreover, in the digital public space, one can apply more than just analogue – conventional – forms of masking. And last but not least, even more daring analogue masking can be used, since you don’t have to go out on the street with them. Rather, it is enough to take a photo or a short video of it. Photogenicity is therefore more important than functionality, and in this respect there are hardly any limits to the possibilities. After all, analogue and digital masking techniques can be combined at will.

The account fashion_for_bank_robbers on Instagram gives a very good impression of how diverse, extravagant and elaborate masking looks in the digital public space. Since August 2018, it has been curated by the artist Carina Shoshtary, who herself designs artefacts on the border between jewellery and masks. The account now comprises more than a thousand posts, and the creators of the masks presented are introduced in the captions, often with original sound bites, so that a good impression of the concept and claim of the respective design is conveyed. The first thing to notice is that hardly any of the masks presented here would be conceivable in an analogue space – because they would be too fragile for that, would restrict the freedom of movement too much or were created with digital means from the outset. And in almost all cases, the masking goes so far that the natural face is no longer recognisable at all or even the entire body is given a completely new shape.[1]

One could also see a mannerism in these examples of total masking, which is precisely due to the fact that many lose all measure out of enthusiasm for the possibilities of digital public space. But one should also recognise that many of the designs are suggestions and proposals. They are meant to encourage followers to pick up individual elements of a masquerade and adapt them, indeed they shall show what is possible in principle. Just as the automobile industry likes to work with concept cars to explore the scope of design and, for once, to dispense with all the otherwise indispensable considerations, an account like fashion_for_bank_robbers should also be seen as a large rehearsal stage.

However, the large number of suggestions for masquerading and the large number of followers who are interested in it impressively prove what an important topic self-dramatisation is in the digital public space. This means that completely different artists than in the past have the chance to become known and influential. Whereas in the past you belonged to a small, rather marginal scene if you did body art or make-up art or acted as a drag queen, now you can reach an audience of millions. You become a role model, and every new mask design is received and commented on. Followers and fans pick it up, vary it and thus fulfil their own demands for staging and disguise.

But even beyond such often popular and sometimes rather shrill varieties of masking, the theme plays a major role in contemporary art – especially in the genres in which the face and the portrait have always been of great importance, i.e. in painting and photography. The exhibition “Face Control“, which we accompany with our correspondence, is also dedicated to the changes to which faces are subjected as a result of digitalisation processes. And you yourself, dear Jana, curated an exhibition last year that asked “about the status of the portrait in the digital age” under the title “Resistant Faces” at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. So you are a great expert in this field, and therefore I am of course particularly interested in your assessment of the digital public space. Where do you see specific dangers or freedoms in it? How do you see it as different from analogue public space? What experiences have you had as a curator?

I look forward to your answers and greet you warmly!

Wolfgang

Illustrations:

1: Instagram-Account of “fashion_for_bank_robbers” (Screenshot) [https://www.instagram.com/fashion_for_bank_robbers/]

2: Merve Morkoç (Screenshot) [https://www.instagram.com/p/CUNauK_ID-u/ (regram on: https://www.instagram.com/p/CUQQT9isidz/)]

3: Adam Kingman (Screenshot ) [https://www.instagram.com/p/B3a5p5olELl/ (regram on: https://www.instagram.com/p/CT5RwdFMetF/)]

4: Luke Slyka (Screenshot) [https://www.instagram.com/p/CQigWyfhfVo/ (regram on: https://www.instagram.com/p/CRwv8cmM4yG/)]

5: mbsjq (Screenshot) [https://www.instagram.com/p/CHdT4m2BBj0/ (regram on: https://www.instagram.com/p/CODqT0YhGVw/)]

Notes:

[1] E.g. here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CUQQT9isidz/; https://www.instagram.com/p/CT5RwdFMetF/; https://www.instagram.com/p/CRwv8cmM4yG/; https://www.instagram.com/p/CODqT0YhGVw/

Dear Wolfgang,

Your words reach me in the depressingly grey month of February in my flat in Brussels and the countless images on fashion_for_bank_robbers stand in stark contrast to the limited colour scheme in front of my window. I agree with you: The account opens an extravagant rehearsal stage for masking culture in the digital public space and is a striking example of how social media adopts and transforms masking-trends from fashion and pop culture that have been around since almost two decades. Especially when we think about Haute Couture-shows by Maison Margiela or music stars like Daft Punk. But besides its colourful variations and citations of fashion phenomena, the Instagram-account opens up the field for our discussion on digital photography in regard to state surveillance, criminal investigations and possibilities of protest from an artistic point of view.

Our conversation takes place in the carnival-season. For someone like me, who has grown up in the Protestant North of Germany, the carnival tradition of Catholic countries like Belgium or the Rhineland, always appeared strange, almost scaring. But over the years, I have developed a growing anthropological fascination for the various traditions and rituals, in particular for the culture of masks. One of the most famous ‘carnal’ parades takes place in the Belgian town of Binche [1]. The centrepiece of Binche’s carnival proceedings are clown-like performers with wax masks, known as „Gilles“. They appeared for the first time during Napoleon’s occupation, who forbid the wearing of masks, and survived as a living symbol of revolt and resistance.

The need to mask oneself and appropriate another identity illustrates one of the oldest desires in human culture and is fundamentally linked to a critique of power and oppression, represented by the state, the church or the king. While the mask of the Gilles formulates a subversive form of protest of the eighteenth-century, contemporary masks, such as the Guy Fawkes or Pussy Riot mask, became a famous symbol during today’s Occupy Wallstreet- and Russian government-protests [2]. Of course, my examples address ‘physical’ demonstrations in public space and, as you mentioned, the cultural practice of covering, hiding and masking becomes ever more important in the age of the digital: today the bodies taking part in physical protests are connected to a new regime of transparency in contemporary public spaces.

“The need to mask oneself and appropriate another identity illustrates one of the oldest desires in human culture and is fundamentally linked to a critique of power and oppression, represented by the state, the church or the king.”

 

Digital tools for biometric facial recognition, used by various states like the US, Russia or China, are redefining the visibility of bodies and faces in the public sphere and follow new parameters of a so-called surveillance culture. Political scientist Shoshana Amielle Magnet vehemently warns against the threat that the use of state biometric facial recognition software poses to democracy: in consequence of 9/11, the methods of state surveillance can now enter areas of life which were previously hardly or not at all controlled. New algorithmic monitoring systems, such as video cameras connected with facial recognition programmes, have been installed in public spaces and are based on a primarily abusive use of data.[3] Regarding Occupy Wallstreet-demonstrations in the US, for example, the abusive analysis of facial data is in service, when videos of demonstrators uploaded to Youtube or Facebook are evaluated by the police and used for investigations. A striking example of how the digital sphere is today connected with the contemporary public space.

At the same time, the digital technologies we use every day are owned by a few commercial megacorporations who store the data and contents we make available and analyse in order to use them for their own purposes. Google and Facebook, for example, are developing increasingly complex adaptive facial recognition programs, to build up a comprehensive image archive of human faces. Unlike interpersonal face recognition, where the counterpart is recognized through complex psychological-perceptual features such as facial expression, emotions etc., the technical variant employs a reductive biometric process: it focuses on a criminalistics and forensic interest aimed at identifying and authenticating suspicious persons. By means of automated facial detection, software translates the specific facial geometry and textural qualities of the head in frontal view into a mathematical model made up exclusively of data points. To find out weather a photo depicts a particular individual, software compares these data points on both images and then calculates the ‘mathematical’ similarity. In this way, pictures from machines or ‘non-collaborative’ portraits are constructed photographs that no longer need a human confrontation and thus dissolve the traditional relationship between photographer and subject based on ‘ethical’ correspondences.

And yet, the contemporary artificial intelligence used today for facial recognition is anything but objective or neutral: facial recognition software often fails to recognize faces of women with dark skin in the photo booth as a human face, because these automated applications were programmed only with pictures of white men.[4] Contrary to this, a large number of criminal databases used by states are composed with pictures of mainly dark-skinned people from socially deprived neighbourhoods, which are much more likely to be recognized by the software – and thus install and repeat racist stereotypes of ‘the criminal’.

“…the contemporary artificial intelligence used today for facial recognition is anything but objective or neutral…”

In regard to the history of photography, the enormous interest in emerging facial recognition technology is linked to the infamous and dangerous desire to read specific ‘characters’ in photographed faces: at the end of the nineteenth-century, Francis Galton developed a classification system, based not on individual portraits but on composite images of a number of individuals sharing perceived ‘characteristics’ (health, race, profession, criminality etc) to gain an average ’type’. This had far reaching consequences for late nineteenth-century criminology, psychology, scientific racism, and eugenics.

In reaction to these alarming developments, many contemporary artists use the figure of the mask to operate outside normalizing viewing regimes, uncovering and simultaneously subverting their appropriating regimes. Zach Blas, my first example, connects in his performative works the digital with the physical public space and vice-versa. His “Facial Weaponization Suite-series”[5], developed between 2012-14, addresses issues of biometric facial recognition by visualising its selective, reductionist approach. The series consists of a total of four different mask types, which were created in special workshops. These mask types are based on the biometric facial information of the participants, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition technologies. Blas uses the masks for public interventions and performances in order to evaluate the facial information of specifically selected marginalised groups, in this case queer, lesbian, Mexican and Black minorities in Western society.

The second work I’d like to introduce is the series “Spirit is a Bone” (2013) by Broomberg & Chanarin, which was included in the exhibition Resistant Faces I curated last year at Pinakothek der Moderne and is currently on view in the Face Control-show at Foto Colectania. ”Spirit is a Bone” consists of 120 individual black-and-white portraits of Moscow citizens, referring to “FindFace”, the facial recognition system that is used in the Russian capital to monitor public safety. Deploying four corresponding lenses, a camera system produces three-dimensional frontal images of faces that look straight at the camera, even when the people photographed are not aware that they are being observed. Broomberg & Chanarin have further developed this dubious surveillance technology and used the digital transformation process of the portrait as a de-personalized “3D death mask”. In their phantom-like mask portraits, photographed on low, anonymizing resolution on blackened glass, there is an absence of human interaction and individualized features. Thus, “Spirit is a Bone” shows that the posing of the individual for the camera, which is so symptomatic of and essential for the history of photography, is being replaced by the algorithmic standardization of face-related data and their appropriation for the purposes of state archives in the post-photographic age.

Dear Wolfgang, in the end of your letter you asked me about my experience as curator. One of the most important issues I am currently confronted with is how to transfer the emptied, ‘non-collaborative’ portrait image from the virtual mega-archives of the Internet into the museum space in order to put the body of the viewer back in the center shift – a query I would like to elaborate on in my next answer to you. Instagram-accounts, such as fashion_for_bank_robbers, store images in the same format, size and resolution. Artistic attempts circle around the challenge to either expose or avoid the flatness of the pixelated, “poor image”[6], as Hito Steyerl calls it. Where do you see the chances but also limitations of artists exhibiting their work exclusively on social platforms like Instagram? Moreover, as co-editor of the book series „Digital image cultures“, you are confronted with a huge variety of digital image phenomena. Which ones do you consider most important when it comes to dealing with questions of ‚face values’ today?

Yours, warmly

Jana

[1] The Binche Carnival tradition is one of the most ancient and representative of Wallonia, Belgium, with their origins dating back to the fourteenth-century and inscribed in 2008 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/carnival-of-binche-00033

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/fashion/guy-fawkes-mask-is-big-on-wall-street-and-halloween.html

[3] Shoshana Amielle Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity, Durham-London 2011.

[4] Joy Buolamwini, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Actionable Auditing: Investigating the Impact of Publicly Naming Biased Performance Results of Commercial AI Products. Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society, 2019,  https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/actionable-auditing-investigating-the-impact-of-publicly-naming-biased-performance-results-of-commercial-ai-products

[5] https://zachblas.info/works/facial-weaponization-suite/

[6] https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

Dear Jana,

Thank you for your letter, which immediately triggered a number of inner images in me. The fact that you are writing about carnival from Brussels made me think of the fantastic paintings by James Ensor, who painted parades and gatherings of masked people there in the late 19th century. Like hardly anyone else, he made the dialectic of masking vivid: people use masks to hide their identity and not least their evil intentions, but at the same time they use masks to protect themselves from the malice of other people. In the end, everyone is masked, and you don’t know where you stand with anyone – whether he or she is more of a victim or more of a perpetrator.

Perhaps someone masks himself in a particularly martial way in order to keep others at a distance, or perhaps he or she does it in order to frighten others and thus to be able to rule over them better. And maybe it’s even about both at the same time. Carnival in particular has therefore always been a source of unrest and insecurity. As you write, it made especially the authorities nervous, because they could not assess when a temporary and symbolic liberation from fixed identities and roles would turn into real rebellion and threaten their power.

If masks have always represented a kind of armament with which people tried to better achieve their respective interests, the need for masking increases even more in times of digitalisation. There are numerous new possibilities and new necessities to hide or alienate oneself, and we should not only think of faces. In some cases, people no longer appear in person, but cover up and multiply their identity by programming bots that post, comment and network for them, but also spy on or attack others. While bots are often difficult to recognise as such, the programmes used by social media operators, governments or criminals to control or manipulate data remain all the more opaque. If they act so invisibly from the outset that they no longer need their own masking, this becomes all the more important for all those who have to reckon with being surveilled at any time and in many ways. You have impressively shown in several examples how differently and how intelligently a number of artists react to this, who either reflect the dangers of surveillance in their works or fight against them in an activist way.

“If masks have always represented a kind of armament with which people tried to better achieve their respective interests, the need for masking increases even more in times of digitalisation”

In general, I find it interesting that many people have become more sensitive to their personal rights. The right to one’s own image, as it is legally called, is discussed and claimed more often and with more commitment. This reflects the completely different circumstances compared to pre-digital times. In the past, photos taken at parties or on holiday were at best stuck in a private photo album; they were thus out of the world: invisible and inaccessible. Therefore, it would have been exaggerated to become suspicious or to resist if someone took photos in public. Things are different today. If photos in which you can be seen more or less by chance are uploaded to a Facebook account or a blog, it is not at all possible to foresee what will happen to them – or will only happen in years to come, when the techniques of facial recognition will be more advanced and social relations possibly even more conflict-ridden than they are today.

However, the more people are aware of their right to their own image, the more difficult it becomes for photographers to take photos in public spaces or at events at all. It is then too tedious or simply impossible to obtain permission from all the people photographed. Just a few days ago, I saw a woman on the street wearing a cap with the inscription “No Photos please”. This may be eye-catching and sometimes even provoke someone to take a photo (which would then not be published). But above all, such an inscription sensitises many other people to think more about whether and under what conditions they actually want to be photographed.

So presumably entire photo genres will soon have to change because many people are no longer willing to be available as subjects. And if they do participate, then only on the basis of precise contractual regulations. That is why we are likely to work more and more with pictures of faces for which there are no real people. You ask which new digital image phenomena I see as particularly important for our topic of ‘face values’, and there I would indeed mention the growing number of photos that are, strictly speaking, only photographic-looking images, since they show something that does not really exist, similar to painted images. In the volume on facial recognition within our book series “Digitale Bildkulturen” (“Digital Image Cultures”), the image scientist Roland Meyer also writes about this phenomenon, which owes itself to the same techniques with which faces can be increasingly identified.[1] Generative Adversarial Networks’ are used here, whereby one neural network is trained by another according to the trial-and-error principle. In this way, more and more real-looking faces can be created. If you visit the website https://thispersondoesnotexist.com, a new face appears on the screen each time, and usually you have not the slightest doubt that you are looking at the portrait of a real person.

It doesn’t take much creativity to imagine that in advertising photography or within stock photography artificially generated faces and figures will be predominantly used in the future. And in pictures showing people on streets, in stadiums or on the beach, they will be added afterwards. After all, it will then be possible to publish pictures with children again without hesitation, which had largely disappeared recently, since children of course already have a right to their own image, which can, however, be protected by parents or guardians to a limited extent at best. So in future, wherever something is pixelated now, photos of non-existent people will be used. Roland Meyer already speaks of “disembodied masks” in the subtitle of his book, and in the future they will presumably become so self-evident that one will perhaps even find the question idle as to whether something is real or virtual. Deep fakes’, which you also deal with, are even more sophisticated varieties of such disembodied masks; here, complete figures that move and speak are developed in such a complex way that they cannot be distinguished from real people.

There are already elaborately produced artificial figures on Instagram that are staged just like real people and then launch influencer careers. The best known is probably Lil Miquela, a “19-year-old robot living in LA”, as the account bio says.[2] She travels, likes fashion, posts her food, and has friends who often don’t make it clear whether they really exist or whether they are purely virtual.

All in all, Lil Miquela, the creation of a start-up company, leads a life like many other Instagram stars – tragic only for followers who fall in love with her and will never have the chance to meet her in person. Should she receive hate comments or be sexually insulted, at least it won’t affect a person with feelings, and in dealing with her and her pictures, personal rights can never be violated, but at most copyrights.

Especially in Japan, digital figures are already more widespread. They also interact with each other. The best known are Imma[3] and her brother Zinn, also called Plusticboy[4], who has also had a girlfriend, Ria[5], for a few months.

The creator of these figures is the start-up Aww, which was founded in 2019 and describes itself as the “first virtual human company in Japan”.[6] The characters are more sophisticated than mere influencers; they also discuss socio-political issues, such as when Imma diversified into a variety of different (physical) bodies for an action at the last Paris Fashion Week in order to combat overly standardising beauty ideals.

This is important simply because virtual figures are so strongly idealised that they function even more strongly as role models than real people, but thus also threaten to exert dangerously great pressure to conform.

Furthermore, Aww’s figures always seek proximity to the world of art. They visit exhibitions by Yayoi Kusama, Roni Horn or KAWS, and Imma has even had her own exhibition.

Most likely, Aww will soon cooperate with artists or with creators of Art Toys and in turn produce more and more artefacts that anchor and authenticate the virtual appearance of figures like Imma and Plusticboy in the real world. I’m pretty sure, it won’t be long either before Aww is taken seriously in the art world, indeed before a project that started as an experiment on Instagram achieves global success and is able to set new standards in several areas. Perhaps accounts on which real people strive to mask themselves with analogue and digital means will one day even be perceived as old-fashioned and uncool. Once you’ve spent a little time on accounts like Lil Miquela’s or Imma’s, the artificiality of many other accounts already seems unpleasant, because you sense how much their operators always have to force themselves into the desired shape. As masked bodies, they are subject to constraints, while disembodied masks emerge completely freely.

Dear Jana, I’m afraid I’ve only given a very rudimentary answer to your question about what I see as the opportunities and limitations for artists who present their work exclusively in social media such as Instagram. But perhaps this one example is at least enough to give you an impression of how the art business could be set up very differently in the future than it has been up to now. I would be very interested in your experiences and assessments. And perhaps you would also like to contradict me?

Warmest greetings to you,

Wolfgang

Fig. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intrigue_(painting)#/media/File:De_intrige,_James_Ensor,_1890,_Koninklijk_Museum_voor_Schone_Kunsten_Antwerpen,_1856.002.jpeg

Fig. 2-4: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com

Fig. 5: https://www.instagram.com/p/CWqv9YOJ8C4/

Fig. 6: https://www.instagram.com/p/CYTdopKrtBb/

Fig. 7: https://www.instagram.com/p/CZE3gu5Pqdn/

Fig. 8: https://www.instagram.com/p/CY_eg9Mvuvr/

[1] Cf. Roland Meyer: Gesichtserkennung. Vernetzte Bilder, körperlose Masken, Berlin 2021, p. 59ff.

[2] https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/?hl=de

[3] https://www.instagram.com/imma.gram/

[4] https://www.instagram.com/plusticboy/

[5] https://www.instagram.com/ria_ria_tokyo/

[6] https://aww.tokyo.

Dear Wolfgang,

Thank you for bringing the paintings of James Ensor to mind. I agree: there is hardly anyone else who illustrated the pitfalls of human condition so brilliantly with his uncanny, grotesque masks that appear inseparable from the ‘real’ face behind. To me, the psychological and political dimension of Ensor’s work becomes most evident in his painting Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889:[i] the artist, a professed atheist, depicts himself as ignored Christ and spokesman for the poor and oppressed amidst a chaotic, masked mob of public, historical, and allegorical figures of his time. It’s hard to say if we see irony or idealism here – perhaps both –, but definitely a timeless criticism of corrupt rulers in power.

In fact, our discussion on the dialectic of face and mask reminds me of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who denounced the impact of Western imagery, especially the propagation of the portrait of Christ. In their essay entitled „A Year Zero: Faciality“ in A Thousand Plateaus, they claim that „imperial“ faces are imposed on us universally and need to be „dismantled“ in order to overcome and reinvent historically oppressed identities and structural racism.[ii] Their critique aims in the heart of a philosophical debate that can be described as ‘ethical turn’ in philosophy which also touches one of the main concerns of our digital present: what if there is no behind the mask anymore? What if our counterparts have become mere interfaces, bots or digital doppelganger?

For the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas the face-to-face dialogue was the basis of an ethical and democratically intact society. Contrary to this, in the digitalised present the game with facial surfaces or avatars replaces the vis-à-vis encounter. As your examples have shown, the invention of digital persona has far-reaching consequences, especially for the genre of portraiture that has been traditionally associated with individuals. Today we are interacting with completely artificial faces and bodies, developed by AI systems like generated photos[iii]. At the same time digital influencers, like Lil Miquela or Imma, have become role models of a new generation that urges to become an image that goes viral. Their globally networked parallel bodies stand for what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid identities”.[iv] These new virtual identities are constructed, hybrid, freely selectable and consequently no longer confined to authentic body representations. But are they really ‘free’ from subtly controlled forms of marketing and surveillance?

On the one hand, one could find it liberating that normative categories, such as gender or nationality, can be left outside online and selected by one’s own choice. On the other hand, it becomes clear that the new media are still characterized by established hierarchies of race, class and gender. Virtuality is not an innocent place. When looking at the rather sexist design of humanoid robots like Sophia[v] or the commercial successful beauty ideals of virtual influencers, such as Ria, Plusticboy and Imma, we witness very similar aesthetics and norms that are propagated by ‘real’ influencers like Kiko Mizuhara (i_am_kikoxo) or Kim Kardashian.

To me, their ‘perfect’ bodies and faces visualize a new paradigm of the digital age, in which the online performance, tied up with an increase of ‘likes’, is ubiquitous and penetrates our lives off the screen. We can observe such mechanisms in the disturbing developments in plastic surgery, which is oriented towards optimizing ‘beauty filters’ used on Instagram and then tries to match the actual face in the beautified profile image by means of surgery.[vi] The difference between what used to be distinguished as the real and the virtual increasingly diminishes.

I don’t want to be mistaken as conservative or too pessimistic regarding the latest technological developments, as there exist definitely some great subversive examples for an intersectional, queer and feminist use of virtual figures on Instagram and Tik Tok. Moreover, visionary art and photography movements in the Global South are currently using the ground-breaking possibilities of NFT-technology to dismantle imperial power structures. It’s just that I am very quickly bored with the generalizing aesthetics and flatness of most of the digital bodies appearing on those platforms. Why is AI mainly designed as idealized female body? Tests made during the development of those artificial intelligences have proven that we trust female voices more than masculine ones, but the dilemma goes much further: for most of the masculine programmers it seems hard to imagine a digital representation of AI outside Western beauty standards. And yes, you are right, these virtual figures are so idealised that they function more strongly as role models than real people and thus threaten to exert dangerously great pressure to conform.

Hollywood-Blockbusters like Ex Machina have been trying to tackle those issues in a sometimes more, sometimes less convincing way. Her, by Spike Jonze, sticks in my memory, as the film avoids the visual clichés of most Science fiction movies of its genre. In Her, the main character falls in love with Samantha, an artificial intelligence that is only represented by her voice. The film puts the focus on the ethical chances and concerns of encounters between human and AIs, without falling into the trap of over-ambitious, far too soon out-dated Sci-Fi-aesthetics or special effects. Naturally, the love story has to fail.

Obviously, the contemporary art world is full of sophisticated reflections on the new relationship between man and machine and there are various artists, such as Lynn Hershman Leeson, Stephanie Dinkins, Anicka Yi or Jordan Wolfson, who critically address in their works trans-humanist concepts of life. For me, the encounter with Goshka Macuga’s humanoid robot as part of her installation What Was I (2016) remains quite impressive . With the help of a Japanese robot-lab, Macuga designed a masculine android that interacts in a forty-minute long philosophical speech with the visitors of the exhibition. While the robot kept reciting a montage of epochal speeches by politicians, philosophers, and playwrights, I became more and more irritated by the impossibility to look into his eyes, to catch a moment of intimacy.

I wonder, too, if it won’t take long before virtual figures created by start-ups like Aww are taken seriously in the art world. However, phenomena like the “Post-Internet-Art”-movement, prominently summarized at the Berlin Biennale 2016, played with the flatness of digital imagery images in mostly affirmative ways. Many of the exhibited works focused exclusively on the visual language that dominates digital space by showing art that is made for its own installation shots, or installation shots are presented as art. Interestingly, today no one in the contemporary art world refers to the movement anymore.

On a curatorial level I am, contrary to this, interested in the little errors, breaks and cracks of digital image making; in works that experiment with technology rather than making technology to its main aesthetic and discursive subject. What happens when the emptied, ‘non-collaborative’ portrait image is being transferred from virtual mega-archives of the Internet into the physically experiential museum space? How can artists play with specific materials and aesthetics that clash with the digital sphere? How to put the body of the viewer back in the center shift?

Various contemporary positions focus on questioning the assumed objectivity of circulating (body) images by undertaking new arrangements of digital image material in complex exhibition displays. Eli Cortiñas’ video installation “The Excitement of Ownership” (2019), included in the “Face Control” exhibition at Foto Colectania, examines the stereotypical presentation of the female face and body in social media. It shows how sexist and racist enactment-clichés have persisted into today’s presentation of women, for example in the hyperreal design of sex dolls, in the already mentioned humanoid robot Sophia, or in the digital avatars of computer games. The two-channel installation takes up hybrid visual forms of the digital image, which are used as a moving picture in the video loop, as puffed up iconic separate images on wall papers and as an audio-visual installation, physically perceptible in the exhibition room. By playing with image sampling and reproduction of historical and contemporary material, Cortiñas makes various digital image qualities visible and simultaneously provides a subversive commentary on the World Wide Web. She shows how the new digital technologies impact on our ideas of gender and ethnicity and stages the body as “glitch” in the sense used by writer Legacy Russell, i.e. as “technical misfunction” or “fracture point in the interface”, with a potential for collective forms of networking and re-designing.[viii]

After all, the critique of circulating, digital (body) images of our virtual present can be seen in relation to Ensor’s attack of the power structures and Christian iconography of his time – only the masks and technological possibilities seem to have changed. Living in a dominant culture of digitally performed self-improvement measured in ‘likes’, Ensor’s search for identity behind the pretence of every-day life seems particularly topical today. With this in mind, I am looking forward to continuing our dialogue, face-to-face and via Zoom, soon. Let’s wear our most gentle, curious mask.

Yours, Jana

[i] https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/811/james-ensor-christ%27s-entry-into-brussels-in-1889-belgian-1888/

[ii] Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari: Mille plateaux, Paris 1980.

[iii] https://generated.photos/

[iv] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge 2000.

[v] https://www.hansonrobotics.com/sophia/

[vi] Nora Voit, „Gefiltert sind wir alle gleich“, in: Zeit Online, 3.1.2021, https://www.zeit.de/campus/2020-12/instagram-beauty-filter-schoenheitsideal-selbstbild-diversitaet-psychologie

[vii] https://www.prada.com/it/en/pradasphere/special-projects/2019/rong-zhai-what-was-i.html

[viii] Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism. A Manifesto, New York 2020.