This Person Does Not Exist by Sergey Gusev

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Oil on canvas by Abbie Schug

Abbie is a Visual Artist based in Suffolk whose research considers visual simulations of the human body and the transmission of data across traditional and digital media. Using images sourced online, Schug [re]photographs visual data into a state of natural mutation - suspended between presence and absence - before finally translating the intangible digital image into an oil on canvas artefact. This practice establishes a discourse around the quasi-being of visual data; the threshold between reality and simulation and the relationship between artist and image. Her current project sees the translation of a ComputerGenerated quasi-human model.

ThisPersonDoesNotExist

WRITTEN BY SERGEY GUSEV

First I go to thispersondoesnotexist.com and refresh the page ‘til I find a suitable face with no neuro horror in the background. The neural generator creates faces based on random pictures of random people. It’s creepy at first – seeing a person and knowing it has just appeared because of one click, and will disappear because of another. The eyes, the smile, the camera flash on the face – it all seems real but it isn’t.

I noticed that most of the generated faces smile, because the majority of photos have smiles. People force a smile for a photo, upload it and make others believe that’s how they really are: eternally happy with a beautiful wide smile on their face – an image as fake as their smiles. As fake as the accounts I keep making.

I log on to Facebook and create another fake account for another fake person. I will them into existence, give them a name and a story. This is Greg, a forty year old engineer from LA. This is his wife Linda, a cashier at a local groceries shop. This is John, their elder son, he has just graduated from Harvard, and his parents are very proud of him. This is Alice, she and John have just married and she is expecting. Just one of the families I have created. Greg always reposts baseball and patriotic content, Linda comments on gardening groups, John likes IT and Alice always posts pictures of her growing belly. Sometimes I find a decent couple picture and photoshop their faces together on a beach, in a park, in the living room. Sometimes I photoshop other people: friends and relatives of Alice and John. Fake people with fake smiles and fake lives.

They only exist so far as I allow it. I have killed people before. Fake people, of course. There was such a man as Thomas Brown and he was a total douchebag. He was abusing drugs and left his wife for a younger girl and took all of their lives’ savings. Thomas wanted to take his girl to Las Vegas, but I gave him a heart attack while he was snorting cocaine.

His wife Jennifer was devastated nonetheless and wrote posts about her sadness. Luckily, she found Bob, a loving Christian, and eventually married him and had two more kids and a hundred more posts about caring for her new babies. I’m happy for them. However, I’m thinking of giving Jennifer a miscarriage followed by sad posts on her page so that her story wouldn’t be too happy after all.

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Oil on canvas by Abbie Schug

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Detail. Oil on canvas by Abbie Schug

When I get bored with making up stories about fake accounts, I reach out to real people through them. Linda has a bunch of friends her age that share her passion for gardening, each of them convinced she is real. Some Indian guy tried to hit on Alice even though it was clear she is married to John, who is by the way sexting on the side with random teenage girls. Alice must not know that, or their marriage will collapse.

I don’t know why I’m doing this. I guess it is a substitute for a life I don’t have. No girlfriend to take silly selfies with, no friends to like and comment on my own page. It’s like playing with toys, but for everyone else to see. Modern social networks allow us to be faker than ever, and we love that. Your avatar is a mask, your page is your super-ego, the better you, the one you would like to be but ultimately cannot. The difference between me and the others is that I enjoy this fakeness in a different way.

In the early 20th century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa was famous for having a number of fake personalities, each of whom wrote in a totally different way – one was an avant-garde poet, another was a thorough traditionalist, the third wrote prose and so on. It was not enough for him to come up with pseudonyms, he had to create a background for a name, and by the end of his life he had around eighty different characters just for himself. Late Soviet writer Sergey Dovlatov said: “Unselfish lying is not lying – it’s poetry”. He was not referring to Pessoa, but I think Pessoa is the ultimate proof of Dovlatov’s words. I guess I am a weird kind of poet as well.

Maybe I’m unwillingly trying to prove something. I see all this drama online, all this pointless attention seeking, and through the super-egos of social network accounts I see the id crawl out of the darkest corners of people’s psyche. The only ones trying to create a perfect picture of themselves are those morally handicapped, unable to accept themselves for who they are. I can’t blame them. The social network always pushes you to be younger, richer, smarter, more righteous and more beautiful. To capture the perfect angle of yourself. I don’t think this lie is deceptive, because anyone can see through it. It looks more like a desperate lie of people devastated by the riches of successful entrepreneurs and looks of Hollywood stars – all of it just a few clicks or taps away from their own pages.

John cheated on Alice with an underage girl and got arrested on the charges of pedophilia. Alice is divorcing him eight months into her pregnancy. Linda and Greg are trying to get John a proper lawyer and deny all charges, unable to believe their son could do something like that. Jennifer had a miscarriage, developed major depressive disorder and plunged into alcoholism. Bob is thinking of leaving her and taking full custody of the kids. Bob posts that he no longer believes in God. Linda stopped chatting with her gardening buddies and rarely appears online – she is too busy with the upcoming trial.

I think I’m just trying to fight the lies of other people by creating lies of my own, the lies which are nonetheless truer than anything they post. I am a poet of truth in the network of deception. I do not seek the truth. I only wish to avenge it.

Born in a provincial town in Russia in 1999, Sergey is currently studying in Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow and trying to make it as a writer.

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