In 2011, I created Webcam Portraits, a series of portraits captured from online video chats, photographing strangers directly from my computer screen. These low-resolution, pixelated images challenged conventional standards of photographic quality, embracing the aesthetics of digital imperfection. Exhibited the same year, the series questioned the relationship between traditional photography and the emerging digital landscape. The screen pixels, replacing film grain, became symbols of a world increasingly mediated through digital interfaces. Faces, stripped of analog authenticity, were transformed into fragmented, glitch-ridden echoes of identity, yet remained expressive, filled with traces of mood and emotion.
A decade later, in 2021, the world had undergone radical transformations—lockdowns reshaped digital interactions, blockchain technology revolutionized digital ownership, and AI tools began reinterpreting photographic processes. I revisited the Webcam Portraits series with early generative adversarial networks (GANs), using AI to manipulate and reimagine the original images. The result was Webgan Portraits, a new iteration of the project that layered artificial intelligence over human randomness, distorting and evolving the original portraits into something even more detached from their source. The process raised new questions: How does AI reconstruct human identity? What happens when the already digitized self is reprocessed through machine learning?
Releasing these works as limited-edition Tezos NFTs on hic et nunc, I brought the series full circle— returning the images, once extracted from the online world, back into a new digital ecosystem.
This transition reflects both the evolution of digital art and the growing influence of blockchain as a space for photographic experimentation.
First exhibition: Kaunas Photo Festival 2011.
Published in The New York Review of Books, Der Greif, FK Magazine, among others.
Published in The New York Review of Books, Der Greif, FK Magazine, among others.
