Ziv Schneider

Masks have been used around the world since antiquity for ceremonial and practical purposes, as devices for protection, disguise, entertainment and bodily transformation, made to be worn or displayed.

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about the everyday life as a masked theatrical performance. The performative aspect of our lives today is ever so present in our use of social media, where we present a curated version ourselves for the immediate visual consumption of others. In our “Selfies”, we can assume a multitude of identities and characters.

Recent tools and platforms have evolved social media portraiture to an art form and have created new opportunities for artists to create and distribute interactive augmentations, forming new relationships between artists and viewers. This class explores the developing language of social media portraiture enhanced by Augmented Reality.

Students will:

• study masks in art history, leading up to today

• ideate, design and develop interactive masks, starting from physical objects and moving towards real-time distributed digital masks (AKA effects/lenses/filters)

• learn to use the Spark AR Studio software and other tools