Face Value

Our online lives are data points, assembled into a picture of who we are. We're told that for safety, we have to surrender our most intimate identifiers — biometrics, address, digital footprint — so surveillance systems can complete the profile. We consent because refusal means exclusion: from banking, borders, SIM cards, apps, the communities we already live inside. But consent doesn't exist when the alternative is being locked out. We’re subjected to extraction with a compliance stamp. And the cost isn't carried evenly — migrants, sex workers, trans and undocumented people pay first and pay most when these systems fail. And they fail constantly. In 2025, breaches leaked 6.1 billion personal records. 193 every sixty seconds. You can change a password. You can't change your face. Face Value is a refusal. Each portrait is AI-generated (as real faces have been exposed enough) and fractured into planes drifting through space, never resolving into something a system could file or steal. Every twenty seconds, the face dissolves into another. An endless cycle of people who could exist, each given the protection real verification has failed to provide. To be illegible to the system is the point. The fracture is the argument: the infrastructure built to secure identity is what made it vulnerable. A verified face is an image that hasn't leaked yet. Face Value asks the question KYC was built to bury — if you couldn't protect the real faces, what were you verifying? And when the system loses the face, who pays? The companies that profited from holding it, or any one of us it belonged to? Interact with the work through: https://techgirlonlinee.github.io/FaceValue/