Dysmorphia

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of online video calls grew massively. However, the fragmentation of the video when somebody has a bad internet connection often gets seen as a bug. Within this project, we tried to use the aesthetics of fragmentation to dismantle and recreate faces. Part of this project were Jakob Bechinie, Johanna Wicht, Julia Wohlgemuth and I. Our result is a video, which got shown at the Creativity Rules festival 2021.

Process

To create these dismantled faces, we created filters that functioned as overlays in the tool OBS Studio. One of my main tasks was to develop these filters, which included experimenting with different filters to find aesthetically pleasing effects. After we had a set of filters, we met as a group, and everybody sat in front of the camera, one after another, using different filters to create different recordings of dismantled faces through bodily movement. The bodily movement is of huge importance here, as the filters are static. Only through the movement of the body, the facial dysmorphia gets created.