More Than Real (2020), is a self-reflective project which visually aimed to reflect how my smartphone felt like it has become an extension of both my mind and body. It started by asking how my iPhone, an eminently portable machine, not only has re-defineed what has historically constituted to what it means to have a body, but also how the world found in our pockets is dominating methods of communication in our current technologically mediated communities.

Through an infatuation with digitisation, I want to know how we can navigate horizons of the self in the twenty-first century? Are selfies a fad, or the next step on for self-portraiture? Can we ever make authentic representations of ourselves?

The self-portraits respond directly to technological phenomena, drawing relevancies from the immediacy of social media and the constant flow of images found in the uncurated galleries of our pockets. Through transferring selfies into paint, the project reverses an acceleration-ist aesthetics, involving the act of transferring selfies off screens into slower gallery viewing contexts.

Semiotically speaking, selfies are communicative systems, aligning with paralinguistic face-work stratagems that occur in memoji ideograms and the absence of face-to-face communication. Just like in dramaturgical theory, it could be argued that our everyday selves are nothing more than an act. We play at being ourselves. This thinking leads to a question of intensity and presence when faced with multi-modal expressions. For example, emojis, Memojis, and avatars have all created a way of seeing a reaction, when we cannot be there to witness a smile or laughter firsthand. These disrupted kinds of realism, and the difference between selfie taking and painting traditional self-portraits begins to highlight how there are now billions of online enigmas we scroll past every day have become more than real, and make up the social fabric of portraiture that is being made today.