Alpha Portraits plays out the self-foregrounding dynamics of the social web in a physical installation, exploring short-lived portraiture for the era of social media.

An over-head camera tracks visitors as they walk through the exhibition space, looking for groups and attempting to identify the individual who might be the focus of that group by examining how its members are spatially positioned. Once identified, a second forward-facing camera captures the face of the focal ‘alpha’ individual and begins to draw a large portrait on a sheet of paper hanging prominently on the wall, behind an ornate frame. Upon completion, the portrait only remains for a brief period before the system identifies another group and scrolls the previous portrait to the floor to begin the next drawing.

Alpha Portraits is one project from a body of work entitled Declarations of Interdependence that critiques the centrality of the individual in Western society, and looks particularly at how social media and human-computer interfaces reinforce this worldview.