Birgit (byte)

2022
Eight portraits of Birgit Kos generated by code from existing pictures using a mask

When I started selecting areas larger than one pixel, with the Teddy and the Alejandra portraits, I began thinking about other shapes to use for assembling the portraits. And I was curious what would happen if I used a mask. I decided to use pictures of Birgit Kos; I liked the shape of her face and thought her strong features would still come across through / as a mask.

I love this photo by Man Ray and I thought this series would somehow be a synthesis of the two faces:

Image from manray.net

But I also was inspired to try and get to something like the heads in Demoiselles d’Avignon:

Image from Wikipedia

I created a set of elements to combine to form masks. These were also to be assembled by chance, combining a face, eyes, nose and mouth shape. I ran a test to see how the elements combined:

I generated the images for this series at 500 pixels x 500 pixels. In previous portrait series I could get away with sizing up the sources to 1000 pixels because of the alternating pixels from every other image. But here the sizing up would be too apparent. As before I generated a 1000 images.

There were a lot of results that had a very cubist or dada vibe:

In the selected images the reference to cubism / dada are not too direct, which I like. They function more like a portrait, but are very clearly made up of different parts. To me they form a nuanced picture of appearance, likeness and mask.

Birgit 01
Birgit 01

Birgit 02
Birgit 02

Birgit 03
Birgit 03

Birgit 04
Birgit 04

Birgit 05
Birgit 05

Birgit 06
Birgit 06

Birgit 07
Birgit 07

Birgit 08
Birgit 08

See the m0dels collection on Objkt.com

This work belongs in: m0dels, NFT