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pfp



‘PFP’ (Profile Picture) is a long-running series made using neural nets and digital painting, exploring the splintering of identity in digital environments.

We live in an age where identity can be mass-produced - copied, pasted and altered instantaneously. Our online selves change to reflect the way we want to be seen and also how others see us. They are ‘I’ and also digital media constructs, something elastic between the ‘I’ and other. 

The artworks are made by breeding game characters into separate game environment using neural nets, multiple times. The process of merging character and environment produces digital artefacts, glitches which are magnified and repeated. The artefacts form the basis of the composition, caught between character and environment, somewhere in the middle of the neural net’s process of gradient descent. Additive processes like layering, masking and digital painting are also used. 
PFPs on Ethereum
PFPs on Tezos


‘1:1 PFP’





‘degenerative’



‘How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And if my secret self is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?’

Jacque Derrida
The Gift of Death


‘UR PFP: sLABS edition’

New variations of the PFP series were created in response to the launch of Pantone sLABS ‘metaverse-ready’ colour palette. The synthetic characters are bred into separate synthetic environments using neural nets, then traced by hand, but these PFPs incorporate the PANTONE sLABS palette.


‘BURNT PFP: sLABS edition’


The PFP series was continued as a dynamic AI edition where the artwork is constructed from elements of the older PFP works. Each edition is the same as the others, but they are all different at any given moment, due to the complex dynamic changes. The changes are almost imperceptible, questioning the reliability of memory, perception and identity. Here are two live editions:


‘PFPx30’