We’re very accustomed to portraits of people—we see them all the time. But can portraiture be extended to digital entities such as files, folders, apps, operating systems, and even AIs?

A good portrait, it is commonly believed, captures the inner-world of its subject.

Enter The Machine is a series of algorithmically-generated portraits that captures the complex inner-world of digital entities such as files, folders, apps, and systems.

This series of work asserts that not only can portraiture be expanded to include digital entities, but doing so will give us new ways of seeing and understanding the digital world around us.

File portraits are made by a series of steps that begin by transforming the file into binary code (0s and 1s), interpreting the binary data as pixels that contain color and position, manually transforming the algorithmically generated results to better express the nature of the digital entity, and finally deploying the visual portrait on the web.

Harkening back to the centuries-old tradition of subjects coming to an artist’s studio to have their portrait made, a portrait studio for digital entities is a contemporary version of the same model except it makes portraits of digital files, folders, apps, and systems rather than people.

Similar to a traditional portrait studio, Enter The Machine creates portraits of two kinds of subjects:

1. Culturally and historically significant, a.k.a “famous files”
2. Personally meaningful to an individual or small group

More about the two series, Portraits of Famous Files and Portraits of People’s Files, here.