PRIM∆ IMP/RƏSSIØ
PRIMA IMPRESSIO is a web-based critical artwork that generates a physiognomic verdict on your face from a single photograph.
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 abandoned. The structural logic of physiognomy — that faces carry meaning, that they can be read, that first impressions are data — runs through the face-reading systems in use today.
PRIMA IMPRESSIO makes this explicit. Submit your image. The machine measures it with the instruments of two centuries of physiognomy and race science — Lavater's character reading, Le Brun's animal heads, Camper's facial angle, Broca's nasal index, Galton's composites, the Von Luschan skin scale — and delivers its verdict. Then it tells you what each measurement was used for: from the police archive to the sterilization law, from the camp to the algorithm.
Every historical claim is sourced. No words are put in the mouths of the dead.
The judgment is satirical. The mechanism is not.
Ok pretty face. Your photo never leaves your browser and nothing is stored. To write the verdict, only anonymous measurements — ratios and angles — are sent to the AI. Here visits are counted, not people: GoatCounter, open source, no cookies. It sees the page, where you came from and your browser, keeps only the totals, and forgets you.
L∆UNCH ∆PP →