Data Portraits

After watching The Social Dilemma, I re-evaluated my relationship with social media and decided to explore what kind of data Facebook had on me. I requested my data and began analyzing it, which led to an idea: turning that data into art.

I extracted a list of advertisers that had targeted me and wrote a script to create a self-portrait using their names. The process involved using a U-net neural network for background removal of my source image and OpenCV to overlay the data onto the portrait. I also created similar portraits for some of my friends using their Facebook data. These pieces make me reflect on how social media platforms "see" us—through the lens of targeted ads and data.