Phase I of working on “Temporal Portrait: Carrie” was to create a hyper-realistic 3D version of myself. I then rendered a portrait of my 3D model and ran it through selfie-editing apps popular in the US and China like FaceApp and Meitu美图. These image manipulation apps use facial recognition technology and deep generative convolutional neural networks to produce hyperrealistic, transformed versions of the original face. Growing up between the US and China, I witnessed the intensification of celebrity face culture and emergence of 看脸时代 (literally meaning: the age of looking at faces), a Chinese internet term coined in the last decade to describe the societal pressure of embodying and uploading a “beautiful face” in the age of internet and social media. With the mass production and circulation of digitally manipulated images, “artificially perfect” faces circulate and feed into cycles that perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards that subliminally seduce and permeate media and culture. With the lack of control over our private facial data, our faces become files in which our features are analyzed, compared, averaged and metricized. #3Dmodel #wireframe #newmediaart #faceapp #meitu #instagramfilter #selfie #selfportrait #facialrecognition #GAN #neuralnetwork #beautycam #artificialintelligence #digitalhuman