Face codes

Andreas Müller-Pohle (Germany)

Andreas Müller-Pohle has been exploring the manifestations of digital codes since the mid-1990s. His series Face Codes consists of portraits of Japanese people taken from video recordings and then digitally reduced to their typical facial features. The resulting image files were then opened as ASCII text files, and the alphanumeric code was “translated” into kanji characters using a program that can process both Roman and Asian characters. From this, an eight-character “string” was selected to represent the overall genetic code of the images, and placed at the bottom of the image. With these conceptual works, Müller-Pohle refers not least to the textual (and thus linear) base of every digital image – and to structural parallels to the world of genetic codes, as he later examined in his Blind Genes (2002).

Wolf Lieser: Digital Art. Potsdam: h. f. Ullmann, 2010