Facetune Portraits - Universal Beauty (Japan, India, Korea)

In Gretchen Andrew’s new series of Facetune Portraits, custom robotics scribe the popular AI-driven beauty filters of social media into oil paintings derived from images of quintessential beauty. Normally, on TikTok and via Zoom’s “touch up” feature, these visual modifications occur seamlessly and invisibly. By making this process visible, Facetune Portraits reveals the messy co-existence we have with our digital selves. Comprising a potential 100 contestants from 100 different countries, Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty looks at the homogenizing impact of this monocultural AI beauty standard across the faces and bodies of famously beautiful women from around the world. As this same algorithm sculpts the female form into a single, universal look, we see diversity disappear. While unaltered human faces coexist with the algorithmically “perfected” versions, a double portrait is created—a visualization of reality meeting desire. The result is a full length portrait of tension, where each brushstroke, smudge, and painterly contradiction is a record of disagreement between how our faces and bodies actually look and how AI says we should be. ​These works portray the absurd, all-too-real scars of the hidden “perfections” that lurk behind so many of the images we experience, revealing our desire not only to be beautiful, but to be like everyone else, accepted as much by the algorithms as by our peers.