BORN NOWHERE: CHARACTERS

Born Nowhere is a social-media art project that uses Facebook as a platform for crowdsourcing identities. By using self-portraits and modifying them via digital techniques, the artist transforms facial characteristics, giving herself a new personality.  

The artist invites Facebook users to share their own thoughts, comments, and interpretation of character photographs as a way to provide both a flexible framework for interaction and an unbounded socio-cultural experience. The user comments inform and influence the creation of each unique persona who is given a name, life, and personality traits. The artist uses the aggregated comments from Facebook to construct a character’s biography. And each new character is influenced by what psychoanalysts term “projection,” that is, the characteristics that the viewer ascribes to the character but reflects his or her own background, reality, and fantasies. 

According to personality theory, each individual identity results from the interplay between three factors: what the person is, what he or she wants to be, and what others believe this person to be. 

What one sees is what one wants to see.