Our project Personal Codes describes the interface between digital photography and relief. With this project, my sister Kirstin (kirstinbecker.de) and I wanted to show the levels of abstraction in personal digital distortion and eventually make them haptically perceivable.

In future, digital IDs are supposed to ensure a person's verifiability with the help of biometrical data. Passport photographs have so far served as a simple means of identification and are supposed to become depersonalized in the future. This development gives reason to deal with personal identity in the public sphere. In times of digital web 2.0 applications and massive re-inventions of profiles by and with these new media, a desire for experimental uniqueness and extravert public display is becoming more and more prominent.

Seen from a societal angle, the identities of private individuals are mutating into digital mass projections that can be scanned and attacked; their real personalities can become entirely irrelevant. Blogs, wikis and social communities turn the web's anarchic nature into an arena for almost unlimited personal navel-gazing and spontaneous networking. Today a person's digital profile in web 2.0 is more multi-faceted than the assumed “aura of the original” (Walter Benjamin). Genuineness, reliability, emblematic or distorted identity are the subject-matters of our project.

The chip carrying the “personal code” is the result of this distortion of the actual individual. The portrait is systematically distorted in three steps, and its colour scheme is specifically altered by adding personal characteristics (height, weight, date of birth etc.). The pictures move rhythmically between a merely linear, geometric and an organically flowing presentation, thus reproducing an individualized relief of one's personality. The idea is to artificially alter a portrait in its distinctiveness in order to de- or encode the picture beyond recognition by means of abstract representation.

The re-attribution to a personal identity is established by the fixed colour scheme of the last picture; its significance is manifest in the “chip”. The “chip” thus contains all the important personal data defining an individual's profile and will always remain distinctive of this individual.