The Istanbul Digital Art Festival (IDAF) convened for its fifth edition from June 11 to 15, 2025, at the Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM). Organized around the thematic rubric 'Connecting,' the festival presented works by eighty international and domestic artists with the institutional support of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Curated by Rahim Ünlü, Niyazi Erdoğan, Samed Karagöz, and Evgeniya Romanidi, the edition also designated an artificial intelligence agent dubbed 'Avind' as a co-curatorial participant.
The curatorial premise interrogated how humans maintain authentic connection across thresholds where online and offline existences increasingly collapse into one another. The exhibition was framed by an extensive public program of panel discussions, participatory workshops, digital performances, and experimental audiovisual installations. I took part in this edition with my interactive biometric digital portrait installation, PersonA.
How PersonA Operates
PersonA captures the face of each spectator standing before its optical sensor. Custom software detects sixty-eight facial landmark coordinates—the geometric positions of the eyes, brow, nose, lips, and jawline—aligning these coordinates in real time with the corresponding landmark vectors of the portrait currently occupying the screen. It subsequently morphs and blends the two identities into a single, unified hybrid likeness. This synthesized face then becomes the immediate baseline for the subsequent viewer. Throughout the exhibition, the artwork evolves cumulatively: the face displayed belongs to no singular individual, yet carries the physical imprint of everyone who stepped into its field of vision.
Dual Readings of the Name
The title operates on two deliberate linguistic registers. The first is 'persona': the classical Latin term for the theatrical mask, invoking the social face an individual presents to the world. The second is 'Person A': the anonymous bureaucratic pseudonym employed across legal proceedings, investigative dossiers, and surveillance datasets to strip an individual of identifiable biography. One names the theatrical performance of a face; the other designates its clinical erasure. PersonA operates in the charged interval between the two.
Why This Work?
My artistic practice has long investigated the tension between portraiture, faciality, and anonymous existence. In my Biometric painting series, I explored how optical surveillance reduces the human countenance to actionable data. PersonA subverts this logic from within. Facial recognition algorithms were engineered to distinguish individuals—to isolate, identify, and categorize. PersonA deploys identical computer vision tools to dissolve distinctions, fusing diverse faces into an egalitarian collective hybrid.
Five Days at AKM
Across five bustling days in the grand foyer of AKM, thousands of visitors engaged with PersonA. Spectators of all ages paused before the camera, observing their own facial architecture register on screen before subtly merging into the features of preceding strangers. Initial hesitation frequently gave way to sustained contemplation: viewers leaned in, tilted their heads, and watched their singular features dissolve into an ever-shifting collective continuum. By the festival's conclusion, the installation had woven thousands of sequential gazes into a living, cumulative portrait of Istanbul's digital public.
Digital Art Festivals and Figurative Tradition
Digital art festivals are frequently dominated by spectacular generative abstraction or immersive projection mapping. PersonA seeks to introduce an inquiry rooted in the history of figurative portraiture into the digital medium: is painting a face an attempt to freeze a fixed identity, or an effort to register its perpetual mutability? In Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, the canvas carries the accumulated weathering of time and biological aging. In PersonA, the face carries the accumulated weathering of other human beings.
Sources: Euronews Türkçe (May 14, 2025); Platin Magazine (June 14, 2025); AKM Official Event Archive; Istanbul Digital Art Festival Catalog.