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Pro-Folio Generates Personalized (Fake) Artist Portfolios

Who do you want to be?

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Image via Complex Original
Complex Original

The open-source artist’s web has gone full FUBAR.

Pro-Folio, an Internet page coded by Sures Kumar, as part of a project at the Royal Academy of Art and Design Interactions called Scientific Hoax, creates totally fabricated artist’s portfolios with nothing more than the click of a button. Above is the making-of video, an immense undertaking. Kumar’s code sweeps the bowels of the open web to come up with images, colleges, and more, making you look like a pedigreed painter with the click of a button. He posits the site can create 690,903,803 trillion unique identities.

It seems the intention of the website is to manufacture human identities through computer code, giving the notion that the self is nothing more than an amalgam of random events, locations, pictures, and phrases. If that’s not terrifying enough for you, here’s how Kumar describes the piece, in part:

While this is fun to tool around with—you should see how our portfolios look sprinkled with random high honors!—it seems like only a matter of time before some art student gets caught using this to apply to college. Fingers crossed! We love a good hoax.

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