February 6, 2009

| Personality and Urban Affection >>

The art of the social network self-portrait has been widely-commented-on, but I still think this is pretty great:

Matt Held paints Facebook profile pictures. The technique is pretty excellent: He’s created a Facebook group that anybody can join; he picks portrait pics from the group to paint.

But then there’s a Heisenbergian observer-affects-the-observed kinda meta-thing going on here, because of course the people who he paints instantly use their new portrait as their profile picture. I think that’s the genius of the project.

Profile and portrait above both of Caroline Giegerich, who writes the terrific Daily Marauder blog.