Digital portraits

In an age when technology enables us to have a range of different identities, Margot Bowman’s new work, Identify, uses an algorithm to explore and visualise the ways in which we self-identify today. The software, created by Bowman and the developer Edvin Candon, accesses the camera on users’ computers to provide a base image onto which graphics are added depending on the answers provided to a range of questions.

‘In a world in which people have the freedom to self-identify, old top-down systems of cultural representation – a stamp with an old woman’s face on it or a coin that features a plant you’ve never seen – are out of touch and alienating,’ Bowman told It’s Nice That.

The online concept was accompanied by a workshop at Tate Modern at which Bowman discussed the premise behind the work and showed how the coding works.