Abstract

The article examines Augmented Reality Filters (ARFs) applied to the human face (ARFace). After having highlighted two key issues (Snapchat dysmorphia and ARF branded versions), the article focuses on artistic uses of ARFaces (ARtFace) and draws a typology of them. In light of their artistic and reflexive uses, ARFaces appear as technologically assisted and oriented dispositives for the visual constitution of their users’ identities. More specifically, ARFaces take up the tradition of the self-portrait, but orient it in the novel direction of an endless and dynamic redetermination of the portrayed face. The result is an open, hypothetical, unstable conception of identity, as well as a crisis of the face due not to its disappearance but rather to the excess of its presence.