Universal Beauty

In Gretchen Andrew’s new series of Facetune Portraits, custom robotics scribe the popular AI-driven beauty filters of social media into oil paintings derived from images of quintessential beauty. Normally, on TikTok and via Zoom’s “touch up” feature, these visual modifications occur seamlessly and invisibly.  By making this process visible, Facetune Portraits reveals the messy co-existence we have with our digital selves.

Made up of a potential 100 Contestants from 100 different countries, Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty looks at the homogenizing impact of this monocultural, single AI beauty standard across the faces and bodies of famously beautiful women from around the world. As this same algorithm sculpts the female form into a single, universal look, we see diversity disappear. While unaltered human faces coexist with the algorithmically 'perfected' versions, a double portrait is created – a visualization of reality meeting desire. The result is a full-body portrait of tension, where each brush stroke, each smudge, each painterly contradiction is a record of disagreement between how our faces and bodies actually look and how AI says we should be.  ​

 These  works outwardly portray the absurd, and too-real  scars of the hidden ‘perfections’ that lurk behind so many of the images we experience – revealing our desire not just to be beautiful, but to be like everyone else, accepted as much by the algorithms as by our peers.

Oil Painting on stretched canvas, 48 in. high x 20 in. with solid wood strip frame, signed on verso.

Oil Painting on stretched canvas, 48 in. high x 20 in. with solid wood strip frame, signed on verso.

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The Making of

Facetune & BodyTune Apps - Digital Facetune

Facetune Portraits use custom robotics 🤖 to physically apply popular “beautifying” AI 👄 into oil paintings 🎨. The resulting Facetune Portraits reveal the tension between who we are and who AI and algorithms say we should be. 

  1. Facetune & BodyTune Apps - Digital Facetune. Using popular phone apps called Facetune and Body Tune Gretchen puts the original digital file into the Facetune and Body Tune apps and selects for the apps to use AI to “enhance” the image. This results in a digitally modified photo, known colloquially as a “facetuned photo.” These modifications are chosen by the app which shows a screen “AI at work” during the image processing.

  2. Create an all-white under painting to add texture and painterly effect.

  3. Oil Paint Printer - Print original image in oil paint.

  4. XY Drawing Robot - Apply Facetune modifications physically

    The wet oil painting is placed under an XY-axis drawing robot. The robot, instructed by the discrepancies between the original image and an AI-modified (Facetuned) version, adds brushstrokes where lines have changed. This process visually highlights the AI's alterations, creating messy paint strokes that attempt to reconcile the differences, rather than seamlessly editing pixel.