In this short essay, I posit that Facebook’s hard turn towards virtual reality and headsets stems from the realization that new devices who wish to compete for user’s attentions must be immersive.

In 2003, Russian artist Alexie Shulgin, a pioneer of Net Art, created Privatronics, a web page for a factitious eponymous corporation that produced and sold human-like masks like the one featured in the header image. Its goal is to protect its users from face recognition-based modes of surveillance.

I ran a seminar on Iteration and Playtesting this week in class at the Parsons School of Design. My aim was to showcase a product’s creation process as reactive to its technological context then run a playtest of that product using Sharp and Macklin’s framework for evaluating the design efficacy of games.

Ever since it glanced at itself in the mirror, the self has been uneasy. This essay explores two different types of visual representations of the Self, the painted portrait through art history, and the display picture on Facebook to explicate a third, the Crypto-profile-picture (from now on called “Crypto-PFP” or simply “PFP”) mainly used on Twitter and in adjacent networks such as Discord.