Calling all narcissists – the common-or-garden selfie probably isn’t delivering the ego massage it once did, so how about becoming part of a digital sculpture, with your face rendered 8m tall? Step right up to MegaFaces, the brilliant techno-art installation from London-based Asif Khan (last seen by We Heart weaving his magic at a closer-to-home session of the Games), Basel engineers iart and Russian telecoms firm Megafon at the entrance to the Winter Olympics in Sochi. You could become part of a modern Mount Rushmore, not immortalised in stone but, temporarily at least, the biggest talking point outside of the competition.
Khan is experimenting with ways to bring the historically important portraiture genre into the 21st Century. This project uses digital scans of people’s faces taken in photo booths within the enormous cube. The scans are then reproduced by 11,000 “actuators” – motorised sliding rods tipped with LED spheres – that adjust themselves to make the front wall a 3D surface. The result is an immediate but ephemeral form of sculpture, massive in scale and hugely engaging for the audience. Check out the current faces on the MegaFaces live feed; they change every couple of minutes.
Photography, Hufton + Crow
