Face Value by Jason Isolini

In 1976 Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” for any idea that spreads by imitation. Online a meme became a fixed rectangle where each new context reshaped the contents perception. Damjanski has always worked inside the irony of remix where repetition and novelty propagate simultaneously. He’s known for riffing on the internet’s obscure sensations like Ceiling Cat and making apps that extend software into augmented sculptural form. Damjanski is something of a meme himself, an artist described as “living in a browser” who has credited some of his own statements to damjanskAi. It’s within a format of framing that the notion of “Damjanski” evaporates from his own image, like meaning being siphoned from a meme overly shared.

Memes are ephemeral visions that stake a moment in time. Some originate in the feed and lack durability. Others permeate pop culture and sift into everyday life in a couple of syllables. By 2015, “YOLO,” popularized by Drake’s 2011 single “The Motto,” had run the full cycle of  internet culture—slogan, hashtag, T-shirt, apology. That same year a graduate student named Joseph Redmon gave it a second life. His software, You Only Look Once, could take in an entire image at a single glance and return every object in it, boxed, labeled and scored. Redmon’s own project page leaned into the joke, running a YOLO meme alongside the code—a Samuel L. Jackson frame from Pulp Fiction with a gun drawn, “Say YOLO again,” from the infamous hitman scene. The appropriation claimed the meaning at gunpoint. YOLO was about a bounding box and label where machine vision gave you your last look.

In YOLO’s demo videos, streets, kitchens and dog parks swarmed with candy-colored rectangles, defining what machine vision looks like for humans. Their colors, acid green, magenta and cyan, are part of an alternate reality since these colors are almost never found in nature. Each box
carried a tag and score, face, 0.97, the machine’s confidence of sight. The box was a verdict laid over the world.

For The Portrait Show Damjanski built an app that runs machine vision on real people and saves only what the machine draws. What’s left is the box brought into physical reality, 3D printed, then vapor-smoothed until the printer’s layers melt away. Each hangs at its sitter’s exact height, titled with their name and tagged only “Face,” but the sitter isn’t there. Charlotte Kent has compared Damjanski’s disappearing acts to Odysseus, who beat the Cyclops by calling himself “Nobody.” The giant took the name at face value. So does the machine.

Portraits ask for a long look. Damjanski personifies machine judgment and invites you to consider the meeting, one in which you’re also being categorized.

 

Damjanski is an app sculptor. The app Never Not There, commissioned by the Centre Pompidou and the ZKM in Karlsruhe, transformed each museum into a dystopian server room while the LongARcat app creates long cats in AR. The Bye Bye Camera app is the camera for the posthuman era: every picture automatically removes any person. In his latest app, Centre Pompidou Remixed, he turns the museum’s iconic façade into a generative artwork that anyone can remix.

In 2018, he co-founded MoMAR, an Augmented Reality gallery app aimed at democratizing physical exhibition spaces, art institutions and curatorial processes within New York’s Museum of Modern Art. WIRED covered the launch with the headline “Augmented Reality Is Transforming Museums”. The same year, he created an online space that only programs can access. This software performance, called Humans not invited, first hit Reddit’s front page before it was shown at the König Galerie in Berlin.

In 2024, he launched Still Here, a site-specific and permanent Augmented Reality sculpture of himself floating above the entire island of Manhattan in New York.  His work has appeared internationally at the Centre Pompidou, ZKM Karlsruhe, MAMM, NRW-Forum, Kunsthalle Zürich, Postmasters, Office Impart, Rhizome, NEORT+, Photo Elysée, Goethe-Institut Buenos Aires, Roehrs & Boetsch, Pioneer Works and König Galerie. Currently Damjanski resides in New York.