Aesthetic Market

About The Entry

In an era dominated by social media and algorithms, the face has become a form of social currency. Likes translate into value, beauty becomes a resource, and appearance determines access to opportunities. Aesthetic Market uses facial recognition to extract facial features, converting them into a quantifiable beauty value and generating a virtual currency - the FaceCoin. Within the interactive installation, participants can exchange items with their FaceCoin value. The value itself is never deducted: meeting the threshold is enough. This rule highlights the absurd logic of beauty as a qualification rather than a possession.

The project is both a visual experiment and a social critique. It confronts the audience with one pressing question: When beauty is quantified, exchanged, and traded, does beauty still remain beauty?