This is a personal and still ongoing project algorithmic project. It represents a desire to explore the significance of the human face, as a reflexion of an identity that is both personal and public. Further, it is intended to examine what the face communicates, as well as how.

In order to accomplish this, it maps the face of each user through AI detection and applies to it statistical algorithms for emotion or gender detection, as well as an option for a face texture substitution with the purpose of exposing how one might be externally perceived by a collective majority.

Our face is a deeply personal expression of our identity; however, it is, at the same time, a part of our body that we can never see through an introspective gaze, only through a medium. In this way, our own face can only be perceived through a removed 3rd person perspective. Thus, our expression of identity, even of our emotional states, are simultaneously personal and public. They are are worn; read and processed — communicating meaning to be perceived and understood by an external collective entity and which necessarily requires some form of mediation.

This project thus intends to reflect on what it means to embody our own skin and, at the same time, to wear someone else’s. Is there a difference between seeing ourselves through our own eyes and through others’? How personal is our identity if it is expressed and communicated through something we cannot introspectively view and which is necessarily mediated for an external gaze to perceive?