PRIM∆ IMP/RƏSSIØ

PRIMA IMPRESSIO is a web-based critical artwork that generates a Lavater-style moral reading of your face from a selfie.

Johann Caspar Lavater was an 18th-century Swiss theologian who believed the soul was legible in the features. He was wrong, influential, and never entirely discredited. The structural logic of physiognomy — that faces carry meaning, that they can be read, that first impressions are data — runs through every face-recognition system in use today.

PRIMA IMPRESSIO makes this explicit. Submit your image. Receive your verdict. The judgment is generated from your facial landmarks and annotated with your social media context, because these are the parameters contemporary physiognomy actually operates on.

The judgment is satirical. The mechanism is not.