What organization or individual conducted this project?

This project is run by Soojin, a graduate candidate from ArtCenter College of Design. In this project, Soojin proposes a platform to explore viewers’ online presence and increase people’s understanding and awareness of data use, ownership, capture, privacy and sharing. In this website, she shines a spotlight on obvious things on the internet that people don’t normally think about, the amount and nature of online data. With a new portrait of our data in the project, she aims to question what influences us and how we are perceived inside and outside of cyberspace.

This website is run by which of the following organizations?

The website is managed by Soojin Lee. If you have any questions, experience any problems exploring the website or require any further information please feel free to contact.

What is the purpose of this website?

Through the website, viewers are requested to view the mirrored data closely, as the portraits reflect a participant’s data. This experience makes viewers think about the significance of their identity and voluntarily submitting their data to generate a visual interpretation of it in a portrait form. Portraits from this project show you the hidden and visible sides of someone, and this makes viewers gain a deeper appreciation of their data capture, ownership, privacy, and sharing by exploring portraits.

What is Portrait 2.0 and how did it start?

Portrait 2.0 does not take for granted or assume that the face and body are the only loci of online identity. Instead, it proposes that online data and information can be just as expressive and important to representing ourselves in online space. The collection of data and information shows what influences you. Instead of just focusing on appearance, my work explores ways of embodying things recorded or registered online such as internet history and computer data into a human portrait, as these digital data are being created by users and tracked unconsciously through the devices people use.

The outbreak of the coronavirus and subsequent substitution of our physical space with virtual space has accelerated our progress through the current information age. During this time, we are becoming an amalgamation of online behavior and data in cyberspace. Portrait 2.0 spotlights identity within data sharing and privacy and interprets it into new portraits, reflecting our online behavior and history.

The portraits become a window to the true representation that we have missed or couldn't see by just looking at ourselves in a mirror. Portraits of our data in this project aim to question what influences us and how we are perceived inside and outside of cyberspace.