‘Face to Facebook’ Is Part Art, Part Hack

Part art project, part dating site, and part ingenious hacking exercise, ‘Face to Facebook’ is the brain child of Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico. The digital artists stole (in their own words) one million Facebook profiles — everything from interests to photos — provided that data was public. With their massive collection of liberated data, Cirio and Ludovico began poring over the information when they struck upon an idea that seemed rather obvious in retrospect: that people are on Facebook to meet other people. The goal is to connect with others, potentially in a romantic way. So the duo decided to filter the accounts based on their profile photos. Images were fed through an algorithm that sorted accounts into certain personality types (such as “easy going” or “funny”) based on facial expressions. The pre-sorted accounts were then posted to a site called Lovely Faces. As a companion piece to the site, Cirio and Ludovico collected more than 2,000 of the profile images, printed them out and mounted them at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin.