To design oneself is partly to design the digital representation of oneself. One of the most obvious ways of doing this is through manipulating our facial images and videos by the use of face filters. Face filters enable us to digitally become something else, beyond the boundaries of person, gender, race, age, species. Noam Youngrak Son experimented with this by using the face filter Becoming Noam (2020), which applies their facial image on the face of other people. It provides them an opportunity to act or to make statements as the artist themselves, who in their turn can reproduce and spread themself online.
Your digital identity may not only be owned by yourself but shared among a wide range of people who can access the face filter. The self becomes polyvocal and self-design becomes a collective task with distributed agency and responsibility. The users of the face filter could be considered as a committee, an organisation of multiple “themselves” to make various political decisions that one encounters while portraying themself online. Self-design, which seemed like a black box, becomes more transparent and democratic through this process.
Weblinks