2DPA249 - 01 - The 21st Century Portrait

Consider the role digital technologies and images play in shaping your self-image -- is the representation true or false? Yesterday's mirror is today's screen, a site where our curated virtual selves float between the authentic and fake all the while being consumed by outsiders online. The work of this class engages current and past notions of portraiture and what that even is (and looks like) in contemporary digital life. Course presentations, research, and assignments are guided by how digital applications and online images, including ones of people, lose their context or personhood by moving through virtual space. How do these images and our sense of self, identity, and community transcend past physical likeness and become weirder as portrait painting? Through digital tools, such as digital collage and Snapchat's Lens Studio program, alongside analog methods, such as drawing and painting, we will investigate how to use self-quantitative data, analysis of online communications with other users, memes, and avatars (virtual alter egos) to create portraits of ourselves and others. [Previously Named 21st Century Virtual Portrait]