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Tobias Gutmann

Tobias Gutmann

Face-o-mat Sai Bot

Name(s)

Tobias Gutmann (1987)

Instagram

tobiasgutmann

Employment

100%

Education

Master, Fine Arts, ZHdK, Zurich, 2020;
Master, Fine Arts in Storytelling, Konstfack, Stockholm (SE), 2014;
Bachelor of Arts in Visual Communication, HKB, Bern, 2011

Title

Face-o-mat Sai Bot

Year of creation

2019–2022

Place of creation

Zurich

Context of creation

Face-o-mat Sai Bot was developed in collaboration with Dazlus. Face-o-mat Sai Bot is supported in 2022 by the ZHdK Z-Kubator.

Collaborators

Dazlus (AI development of Sai Bot)

Item(s) shown

Face-o-mat Sai Bot installation: on a table with a chair. Face-o-mat Sai Bot collection: 8 portraits by Sai Bot, 2022, framed fine art print, 110 × 80 cm

Dimensions

Face-o-mat Sai Bot: 60 × 30 × 15 cm;
table: 90 × 120 cm;
cardboard chair: 60 × 30 × 30 cm
8 pictures, each 110 × 80 cm, framed

Formats/Duration

The Face-o-mat Sai Bot performance lasts around 5 minutes per person. The portrait is sent to the subject via e-mail as a low-resolution JPEG.

Material(s)

iPads, cardboard, wood, table, fine art prints, framed

Material supplier(s)

Tobias Gutmann travelled the world with Face-o-mat and has portrayed over 5000 people he encountered, expressing their facial characteristics through abstracted portraits. Sai Bot is his newly created digital artist twin, who draws portraits that transmit the Face-o-mat DNA. Sai Bot and Gutmann share a similar artistic approach, but Sai is on a journey of self-discovery, developing their own artistic language. Sai Bot is not subjected to some factors influencing their production, like tiredness or emotion, and therefore is able to “solve” some portraits in ways that Gutmann would not come across. Self-representation through technology has become more present than ever, but Sai works against the concept of optimisation. Sai captures the “sound of a person” instead of producing a photorealistic reproduction of their face. With these highly abstracted portraits, Sai Bot positions themselves as a humanised machine, creating subjective images of the people that participate in its performance.