The Masks of a New God*
The selfie is a relatively new phenomenon, the offspring of the smartphone and social media. Filters and other forms of manipulation such as Facetune, launched in 2016, are the latest mutations in the timeless battle between fact and fiction, truth and propaganda. Deepfake technology, right on cue for the Trump era, threatens traditional notions of truth with obsolescence, because suddenly what people want to see becomes more powerful than what they are capable of seeing.
As this trend was percolating into the culture over the last decade, I found myself more attuned to portraiture and self-portraiture as a genre that shows us our gods. Over a short period of time I connected these experiences: walking through the Frick Collection and observing long-forgotten aristocrats from past centuries; staring back at the smiling faces on the magazine covers in the supermarket; wondering about the function of indigenous masks at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Baltimore Museum of Art; discovering the truly exotic land of the mythos pandemos, otherwise known as the celebrities on Instagram; and a review of my own virtual constructions, begun in 2006, which mined the once-popular realms of the Sims, Second Life, and World of Warcraft.
I began collecting images from all of these sources, chopped them up into parts, then using a script on my computer I churned out new faces like sausages. Most are garbage. But occasionally I’ll get a combination that strikes a chord, and I begin to wonder which god or goddess is asking to be born anew. As an embryo this deity begins to gel in the geometry of my 3D modeling program, and through my clicks and some gentle nudging its archetypal DNA shuffles the pixels around in Photoshop. Ultimately the image takes physical form through the Renaissance technology of oil paint on canvas, before it is once again photographed and swallowed by the digital leviathan, so that it too may live its double life on screen and in the flesh. Perhaps this mask of the new god wishes nothing more than to be adored in today’s temples. Perhaps it calls to you like a siren of old, waiting for you to take out your phone, snap a selfie, and blow its pixie dust into the ether.
* The title is an update of the four-volume series The Masks of God, by Joseph Campbell, which I began reading in 2015.