Es Devlin Is Creating a Living Portrait of the Entire U.K.
British artist and set designer Es Devlin has launched “A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery,” a participatory artwork at London’s National Portrait Gallery running through October 27. The project invites all 69 million U.K. residents to upload a selfie, which is transformed into a charcoal-and-chalk-style image based on Devlin’s drawings and displayed in a continuous stream on a framed screen in the museum’s History Makers gallery. Devlin created the work with Google engineers and technicians, who trained an image-generation model on her drawings. The National Portrait Gallery is also offering online and onsite drawing classes during the six-month installation, with collections director Flavia Frigeri describing it as a way for audiences to both observe and become part of the portrait.
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This story was covered in Auction Fever, Restitution Fights, and Workers Rising