Devlin's Living Portrait Built From Thousands of UK Selfies
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- Es Devlin's new installation, "A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery," invites people across the UK to upload selfies that are rendered in her smoky charcoal-and-chalk style and projected on a framed screen as a continuously evolving carousel of faces.
- Devlin spent three years working with engineers at Google Arts & Culture Lab, training an image-generation model on her own hand-drawn portraits so participants' selfies would read as physical drawing rather than a digital filter.
- Devlin acknowledged the project sits inside a contradiction, noting her artistic "shadow" is being placed in the service of industrial capitalism even as artists worldwide resist AI training — calling the collaboration "an act of reappropriation."
- Ravinder Tagarh, a 26-year-old gallery security guard who arrived in the UK in 2023 to study, was among the first participants and said seeing his portrait projected made him "feel part of this country instead of an outsider."
- Devlin will lead free portrait-drawing workshops at the gallery and plans to take the collective portrait and classes into town halls, libraries and schools across the UK.
- The installation is deliberately imperfect — faces snag and jar before resolving — which Devlin said reflects "the impossibility of crossing the boundaries between us."
Why it matters: Devlin's three-year Google collaboration hands a major national institution a participatory artwork built on AI image generation, even as artists globally contest that exact practice — turning the gallery into an unlikely test case for whether corporate-AI tools can be reclaimed for public-good ends rather than resisted wholesale.
