We have become painfully conscious about our own faces. We watch them reflected in the Zoom grid all day long. And the way we look at each other has changed. Others in IRL are technically bioweapons. Pierce Myers said that in a short digital presentation "Artificial Anthropos (Face as Infrastructure)" during the Strelka symposium "The Revenge of the Real".

While we see less and less full faces in public the usage of filters seems to evolve even faster than before. After a first wave beginning in 2019 we are witnessing sort of a second wave. Instagram Filters Are Changing the Way We Think About Makeup: This filter and others like it have become a way we choose to present ourselves in a time of crisis.

Discussion around blocking facial recognition technology through make-up (CV-Dazzle / Juggalo) seem to belong to a time pre COVID-19. Facial recognition technology can not bypass officially ordered analog masks and we are sitting back at home anyhow – in a big brother like situation with an army of trackers and one single prominent CCTV camera right in front of us, attached to our computer. Masking your face right in front of Zoom is not very promising.

Artificiality is perfectly suited to introduce the strange and the new, probably followed by a more colorful "natural" approach to contradict? Either way in this vast simultaneity there is enough space on all these cloud server to host a myriad of approaches. The artificiality will no longer feel artificial. We will rather look back at fully botoxed IRL faces in shock and awe. Why diminish the real, when you can augment digital.