Portraiture has been part of the human experience for millennia. Across cultures, it was initially reserved for a select few—from the Fayum mummy portraits of Ancient Egypt to the colossal basalt heads of the Mesoamerican Olmec civilization, to the kings, queens, and aristocrats of Europe. Over centuries, the slow democratization of technology combined with changing cultural values progressively expanded who could be represented in portraiture and who could produce it. Today, that expansion is so complete that anyone with a smartphone can create a portrait with the tap of a button.

As portraiture has become nearly universal among humans, a new question emerges: where does the democratization of the portrait end, and what will be the next class of subjects to fall within its scope?

Historically, portraiture has expanded whenever a culture needs to recognize, memorialize, and relate to new kinds of subjects. Enter The Machine extends this tradition by creating portraits of digital entities—specifically digital files, folders, applications, and information systems that increasingly shape our lives and memories, but remain largely invisible as cultural subjects.

Situated between the long history of portraiture’s expanding scope and the present moment’s growing dependence on digital infrastructure, Enter The Machine responds to an urgent cultural need: to develop visual and conceptual tools for recognizing and relating to the digital systems that now structure our lives. By extending portraiture to digital files, the project argues that portraiture remains an adaptive cultural form—one that continues to expand in response to technological and social change.

Exhibitions

• Future/Past, Showfields, Manhattan, NY, 2019
• New York Media Center, Brooklyn, NY, 2018
• (un)Common, 92nd Street Y, Manhattan, NY 2018
• South By Southwest Art Program, Austin, TX, 2018
• Glitch: An Exploration of Digital Media, Target Gallery, Alexandria, VA, 2017
• Digitalia, Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY, 2017
• Borderless: In Time, Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2016
• Miami Project 5, Miami Beach Art Basel, 2016
• Garis & Hahn Gallery, Manhattan, New York, 2016

Awards

• Arte Laguna Prize, First Selection, 2025
• Webby Award in Net Art, 2025
• Webby Honoree in Technical Achievement, 2025
• Lumen Prize, Long List, 2017

Press

• Hyperallergic: Rendering the Anatomy of Our Hard Drives
• Vice: Computer Data Grows Like Vines in ‘Enter the Machine’

Begun in 2016, Enter The Machine 1.0 was artist Eric Corriel’s first attempt at creating portraits of digital files in a way that does justice to their uniqueness, the diversity of the data they contain, and the complexity by which they are structured. Version 1.0 consists of nine 48" x 30" illuminated prints. View project.

Evolving in 2018, Enter The Machine 2.0, is a video series that unravels the file encoding process showing how digital files are created, bit by bit. Version 2.0 consisted of ten programmatically generated videos. View project.

Eric Corriel is a multidisciplinary artist living in New York City. After graduating from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, he received a Diplôme National d’Arts Plastiques from the École Régionale Supérieure d’Expression Plastique in Tourcoing, France. Eric currently teaches Artist as Activist at School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he is also Digital Strategy Director.

Eric has been awarded a Digital/Electronic Arts Fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts and an Impact Artist Fellowship from the Human Impacts Institute. He has been honored twice as a grantee of the New York State Council on the Arts for his work addressing environmental issues and has won three Webby Awards for his design work.

Full bio here.

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions of so many to open-source software. I’d specifically like to thank those who contributed to OpenFrameworks, OpenLayers, GDAL, OpenCV, VueJs, Nuxt, and s5cmd.