So PhotoRealistic

In 17 December 2018, social networking website Tumblr changed its community guideline, banning (adult) contents which “show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, including contents that “so photorealistic that it could be mistaken for featuring real-life humans.” As a result, tons of “profile pictures” got manipulated into colorful mosaics since these accounts published forbidden contents.

On the other hand, with dramatically increasing computing power and progressing artificial intelligence, techniques such as “Deepfake” can generate controversial “photographic” contents actually never existed in real world. These images also got banned from social networking websites .

Photography, in this case, has been put into a double negative situation— it should not be fake, but cannot depict real.

I collect these lossy compressed profile pictures, retouch and modify these “portraits”, as my study of this era.