To design oneself is partly to design the digital representation of oneself. One of the most obvious ways of doing this is through manipulating our facial images and videos by the use of face filters. Face filters enable us to digitally become something else, beyond the boundaries of person, gender, race, age, species. Noam Youngrak Son experimented with this by using the face filter Becoming Noam (2020), which applies their facial image on the face of other people. It provides them an opportunity to act or to make statements as the artist themselves, who in their turn can reproduce and spread themself online.
Your digital identity may not only be owned by yourself but shared among a wide range of people who can access the face filter. The self becomes polyvocal and self-design becomes a collective task with distributed agency and responsibility. The users of the face filter could be considered as a committee, an organisation of multiple "themselves" to make various political decisions that one encounters while portraying themself online. Self-design, which seemed like a black box, becomes more transparent and democratic through this process.
I asked them to become me through the face filter that I made and discuss with the other “myselves” about the questions I’ve frequently asked myself while displaying myself publicly on social media:
What should I do if I can’t sleep because I can’t stop scrolling through my Instagram feed?
How much should I care about the number of likes I get?
Can I post an ugly selfie on Instagram?
Is it moral to proudly post a photo of meat on Instagram?
Should I make my account private or public?
Should I follow back a stranger that follows me?
Do I want to stay in my filter bubble?
Does it make sense to keep using Instagram while politically disagreeing with the corporation that owns Instagram?
Do I have to keep sharing political posts on Instagram even though I’m feeling skeptical about whether Instagram-activism can actually make change?
The discussions are still on-going, and they will continue indefinitely because self-design is a lifelong process. Or they can even last after my biological death, as long as I am remembered by the digital platforms I exist on. You can witness or even participate in those discussions on the official Instagram page of the committee.
Find out more from an article on The Hmm Dossier, The Self Design Committee: How a face filter might or might not democratize self-design