Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portrait Artist Gretchen Andrew on How To Make Yourself Irreplaceable in the Era of AI 

It’s early September in Berlin and digital artist and TFR guest collaborator Gretchen Andrew has a busy month. She’s a woman who is going places, in her career quest to see if the Internet can make her a famous artist, and in the most literal sense: She takes our Zoom call on foot, speed-walking to catch a glimpse of “Facetune Portraits,” the exhibition she’s showing at Berlin Art Week, before the sun goes down. 

For the brand launch of TFR, Andrew designed “Dreams to Reality,” a series of NFTs celebrating the first collection of footwear. Andrew splits her time between London and Park City and travels often (“Facetune Portraits” tours in Paris, Miami, San Francisco, New York and Dubai in the next six months), so the collaboration was a true fit, pairing an artist manifested from an experiment on the Internet with the ambitious mission to invent a luxury dress shoe with the insole of a sneaker. 

“For the digital collectible we decided to go for an animation that reflects Tori’s journey in making the shoes and also the literal and metaphorical journeys we hope the women who wear them go on, ‘from dreams to reality,’” Andrew says of the NFTs in collaboration with TFR’s eponymous founder, Tori Forbes-Roberts. Each of the three pieces of digital collectible art come with an animated, mixed-media illustration of a TFR shoe rendering becoming real, and an affirmation for the wearer.   

For the photo shoot for the collaboration, the artist, whose self-described style includes elevated sporty looks for “literally running from one thing to the next,” wore the Katharine loafer from the collection and “loved the way it felt both powerful and comfortable.” 

On Owning Your Likeness—And Your Power

As a format, NFTs mirror the footwear line’s unmatchable designs. (Any person who has limped in heels can appreciate that, like an elusive dress shoe that feels like walking on clouds, NFTs are unique because they can’t be replicated.) Andrew’s NFT collection for the brand ties into her larger body of work through themes of manifestation, which Andrew explains as her way of hacking the Internet. In her art project and career challenge to become a successful artist online, Andrew set out to use search engines to build associations between her and a famous artist, attacking the “subconscious of the Internet.” 

“I was using these very girly and frivolous ideas of vision boards and affirmations and manifestation, but I was using them in a technically structured way where they were changing Google search results,” Andrew says, pointing to the power a democratized Internet gives the end user. The results were effective. “They were manipulating these big tech algorithms.”

In her touring exhibition, Andrew’s featured collection of portraits employ custom robotics to apply the same face-tune filters that social media users try on to beautify themselves—but using physical paint instead of digital filters. 

Andrew’s robot distorts the faces and bodies of her subjects to expose “where the power is in how we represent ourselves,” by visualizing in the physical world what AI does to our likenesses in the online world. Like an alarm to remind us of our humanity, the work seems to tap the viewer on the shoulder and say, particularly to women: We have power, and we are giving it away to technology. 

“These tools seem like they're very self-empowering because they let us decide how we want to be represented. But then they go into this algorithmic system where someone else has determined that if you look this way, you're more likely to get exposure on these platforms,” Andrew says. 

“The sense of choice disappears quite quickly.”

Andrew has used the robotics to face-tune her own portraits as well as influencers and singers whose careers rely on social media—all of whom understand the pressure to aesthetically appeal to the algorithm while promoting their creative work. 

“I also know if I post a pretty photo, my next three photos will get more traction,” Andrew says, explaining the catch-22, where creators are on social media to work but “are rewarded if we look pretty.” 

What makes the artist’s commentary interesting on a meta level is the irony of using the very manipulation tools and technology she’s commenting on to make the art. After all, visibly distorting subjects’ physical personhood, rather than their online avatars, demonstrates the harm more starkly. So does Andrew see AI’s influence on the algorithms as perilous, or as a tool in her artist palette? While she believes it’s generally bad to normalize using AI tools and filters to manipulate reality, part of how she views her role as an Internet artist is to educate on how the technology works by taking it to an “absurd” level.

Andrew says the wisest course to chart is not to run from (or attempt to outrun) technology but to “rearrange our expectations and personal relationships to it.” She believes the future of AI will be “a lot like the way that capitalism is in our world where it's pervasive; it impacts everything; it changes our priorities.” 

“No creator can fully exist outside of the capitalist system. And that I think is going to be true for AI and, and artists as well.” 

On Making Yourself Unmatchable in the Future of Work 

Andrew spends a lot of time thinking about what makes us human—vulnerability, emotional capacity, desires and unfulfilled dreams—and reframing the negative connotations associated with our fragility as assets in the mixed universe of the future.

If using AI at work is as inevitable as it seems, Andrew’s advice for creators and high-performing women in industries where the future of work is changing is to try to remember you’re not competing with the AI. 

“There are a billion versions of AI and a billion bots and none of them are you.” 

According to the artist, the key is in your humanity, and being yourself. 

“Make yourself irreplaceable,” Andrew says. “Who are you that is different than any other person in the world? If you can believe that who you are matters even to yourself, then you’re the only you that will ever exist.” 

Andrew’s self-transformation and global success are proof of believing in your inner power, answering the question in her virtual experiment on how the algorithm manipulates us—and what happens when we manipulate back. 

As a creator who believes an artist’s job is being celebrated for their unique self, Andrew says, like an irreplaceable NFT, each unique human is inherently unmatchable. 

More than a decade after a false start in Silicon Valley using her degree in information systems and theory (she loved tech but hated her job), Andrew has found a way to use technology to show the public how it’s misused. 

“That was like 15 years ago. Here we are and I’m running around Berlin because I've got this big exhibition opening. ‘It's worked’ is kind of the point.” 

System hacked.