AnimorPFP is a cultural critique of the fragility of one’s online identity, the inherent impermanence in a digital ecosystem in which the inhabitants are intangible.

We increasingly live our lives online, where our presence is represented by a static image, carefully curated to control how we are perceived. Making it jarring for that identity, that single image that represents the totality of an individual, to switch unexpectedly. It’s striking, the lack of object permanence in the digital sphere, as if we are once again infants, confounded by peek-a-boo.

So we must ask: In this era of tech, in a life lived online, what does identity entail? What does it mane to exist online? If one’s digital persona is masked with horse, if one’s visage is more strongly and more often associated with horse than one’s own face, then what separates mankind from equine?

My thoughts on this matter are too profound to be illustrated by prose alone, so I have prepared a poem:

There once was a fella named Harold
He planned to change his PFP but was imperiled
For it defined his identity
Without it, he felt a non-entity
A neighsayer might even claim he was Gerald!

If you read this far then you probably like to read, in which case you should read my substack, raw & feral.

Why, with the beauty of mathematics, of course!

First, we need to understand what the faces in the start and end images look like, so we map facial features across 468 points (using MediaPipe Face Landmarker). Then, these points are used as references for dividing the face into a series of triangles (Delaunay triangulation). We compare the positions of the triangles in the start image to those in the end image, and as the slider moves along, the triangles warp to the end positions, while fading in the colors of the end image (via WebGL).