Surfing the internet and not in the mood for being your fleshy self? No worries! Now you can BUY A FACE! With the help of Buy a Face, you can be whoever you want to be!
Presenting: Face#01 - Winning Smile Charm your way into any cabal with the "winning smile". Greatest teeth on chain!
Buy a Face is a commentary on the current PFP culture. People generate personas through the act of posting, akin to a digital soul. And the faces of these digital souls are the PFPs. These images are so much in the forefront that most people recognize each other through their avatar images instead of by names or handles. People become who they want to be through the act of posting, and look how they want to look through their avatars. But despite it being normalized, it can be uncanny. Most of these images consist of cartoon characters, anthropomorphic creatures and AI generated faces. And these 5 GIFS are meant to showcase this uncanny aspect, but taken to an extreme. Each piece focused on bringing a sense of unease, like a digital face trying to appear human but slowly coming apart at the digital seams.
All of these images were crafted in a 128x96 pixel canvas. The pixel-art helping evoke a certain esthetic of something digitally broken. The colors are bright, off-putting and unnatural, and faces lean heavily towards the uncanny. As if it’s something trying to look human but failing miserably. Glitches and distortions were all animated by hand frame by frame to further emphasize their digital nature and decay. This collection attempts to explore what it means to have a face in the age of the “terminally online”. Faces bought, sometimes for exorbitant prices, or just downloaded for free, how these mold our perception of the people behind them, and how these people create living characters through these faces, despite these face not being alive. In the end, Buy a Face is meant to be something fun and disturbing in equal measures. If in the current landscape, posting equals existence, then these avatars are the faces of these online existences. Digital egregores going beyond the people who curate them. Posto ergo sum.