Ento-Techno Futures

AR filters
2021 3-4

link to my Spark AR portfolio

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Too often, face filters change the shape of our nose, the size of our eyes, and manipulate our facial features in other ways that are subtle enough to imply that it seeks to make us beautiful in a certain assuming standard. When too many filters do the same things to our face, and thus fit us into similar beauty standards, however, we must ask: can we imagine some kind of beauty outside of these boxes?

Ento-techno Futures is a series of AR filters that explore the concept of alien beauty. What does it mean to be beautiful while being alien and powerful? Combining the visual elements of insects and technological agents, and with no specific gender as targeted audience, these filters place their users not within the existing beauty norm, but somewhere new, somewhere outside. Not only are no facial features manipulated, but on top of that, shapes, colors, structures and interactive components uncommon to our daily beauty practices are generously applied to the user’s head.

Unlike other animals or plants, insects are conceived in our cultural imagination as alien and extraterrestrial, as their ways of perception and, in particular, their self-organization are extremely different from what humans have been able to conceive. Thus, the surface features of insects, which connote their perceptive and organizational capabilities outside of our common models, is also placed outside of our vocabulary for beauty. In addition, the futuristic look to Ento-techno Futures places the users in a different place in the timeline, to positively imagine a different future.

The format of AR filters allow a broad audience base to interact with the art by seeing the art applied directly to one’s own face and head motion. Through this interactive exchange, the audience is encouraged to imagine themselves as an entity set outside of the normal beauty standards.

We can’t delete other people’s filters -- nor should individual creators be accused for their creations that contribute to a norm. It is the unbalanced representation of beauty standards on the global scale that is the issue. Ento-techno Futures contributes to the tearing down of singular beauty norms by precisely participating in the same platform as where those norms achieve their power: namely, social media filters.