PRƏ TTY F∆CƏS

Reversing a trend.

While artists are using AI to enhance their traditional practice, I use traditional media to enhance my glitched AI portraits. The digital anomaly comes first. The hands come after.

A selection of faces from THƏ L∆B ØF ∆NØM∆LIƏS — already disrupted by the same generative glitch scripts running through BÆUTY IS CH∆ØS — gets home-printed onto canvas. Then the assault begins. Acrylics, inks, marker pens, watercolours, tempera, oil and wax pastels, highlighters. Masking tape, cotton tape, duct tape, electrical tape, lipstick, mascara, mirror fragments. Collage, drawings, handwritten text. Messy, accumulated, physical. The kind of surface that records everything that was done to it.

These portraits are about the body — its representations, its manifestations, its alterations, its sensations, its emotions. The body as image, dissected layer by layer until something underneath becomes legible: not the face, but the mind behind it. Not the skin, but the pain it carries. The soul that never made it into the photograph.

The written words come from a specific bibliography — books, among many others: The Palliative Society, On Ugliness, No Longer Human, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Poor Things, The Atrocity Exhibition, Helter Skelter. Music: Radiohead, Subsonica, Prodigy, Kurt Cobain. Wherever language and sound break down and become raw material, that's where the texts come from.

The face in the end belongs to no one. Which is the most honest thing a portrait can be.