THEME
Observation/Self Portraiture
CONTEXT
While this exhibition isn’t exactly the same as what I was doing in terms of they’re showcasing snapchat filters and I’m trying to render them unusable, it is an interesting example of snapchat as an artistic tool/ephemeral gallery.
METHOD
To achieve my goal of observing myself so deeply that I stop being observable I booted up my second phone and made a burner snapchat account, with that done I could start sending images from my main account and use my actual phone to stack filters by taking photos of the screen of my second phone. I started off with a neutral picture against a white wall to try and make it easier for snapchat to detect my face (in hindsight I think a dark background may have worked better as the lack of contrast/lightness of the images may have made it more difficult for the facial detection software) and then I started sending images back and forth applying new filters from my main phone onto the image shown on the screen of my second.
RESULTS
I was a little disappointed by both how few filters I was able to add on before snapchat stopped recognising me as a person and how little variety I had in terms of real deformation filters. I didn’t want to be cheap and stack filters that just add some fake makeup or a halo to artificially inflate the number of filters, but I only really had 4 options to choose from having disregarded the ‘minimal’ filters.
I did take a number more photos than were shown in this upload, but they were so similar that they weren’t really worth adding to the final product which I thought was somewhat interesting. Two of the filters, the one that squishes your face and the one that pinches it, both tend to overwhelm any other filters added to the point that the final image before being unable to detect a face look more or less exactly the same no matter what filters you used prior.
