Mirror Mirrors

Mirror Mirrors is a collaborative piece with Sculptor Anthony Guntren to celebrate diversity and play around the research of identity through the study of the Selfies. It is an investigation of the representation of ourselves that we create through selfies. Being able to modify people’s age, sex or race and completely change the identity of a particular selfies is an interesting way to let people understand that differences are just a point of view.
Through the past months I’ve been collecting selfies from a web-based project I created (silviaminguzzi.com/mirrormirror). I asked people to take a selfie, upload it on my website and answer few question about their appearance. I had the opportunity to collaborate with Bernie Tiddeman, professor of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, UK. He developed Face of the Future, an EPSRC funded public engagement project aimed at exploring the latest advances in facial computer vision and graphics, and what they mean for society. The project has developed a number of standalone interactive exhibits, online demos and a lecture presentation aimed at engaging the public with the technology and the social implications of the technology. I’ve been using such software to change the identities of photos I got from people from all over the world. 
In many ways race, gender, age is about difference and how those differences are codified through language, categories, boxes, segmentation, and even the implicit sorting that goes on in our heads in terms of the way we label others and even ourselves.