Engaging, fun, and personal.
This new version of self-portraiture can allow you to enter an immersive virtual environment, such as the metaverse. A space which blurs the lines between real and digital landscapes.
The metaverse was a term coined by Science Fiction novelist Neal Stephenson to refer to a fully immersive virtual environment where people are represented by digital ‘avatars’ who can lead alternate lives in this virtual reality space.
Today there are more entry points than ever before to the metaverse or metaverses, whether through games like Second Life or Fortnite, platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, or even stickers like Memoji.
These entry points are distinctly digital, with the blurring of reality easily deciphered but importantly these entry points to the metaverse are accessible. In particular AR facefilters, which are created by artists and used by everyday people, this artistic expression of self functioning also as a form of designing and accessing the metaverse together.
Nicola Bozzi from the School of Design, University of Greenwich explores the power dynamics behind social media giants, artists, and the use of AR face filters in new research [‘Meta’s artistic turn: AR face filters, platform art, and the actually existing metaverse’] (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2427116#d1e597).
Bozzi’s research published in 2024 in Information, Communication & Society draws from interviews with four different artists who have worked with the aesthetically immerse techno-cultural format of AR face filters, including Dr Jess Herrington, Futures Specialist here at the ANU School of Cybernetics.
We spoke to Dr Herrington about why this research is important:
“Researching how people use AR in an online context is valuable because it can tell us about the distinction between online and real-life personas, how people represent their social selves, and create an online identity.”
Dr Herrington’s [earlier research] ( https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/jessica-herrington) features face filters and AR art and connects smoothly with her work here at the School of Cybernetics through a focus on connections between humans, machines, and the environment.
The original depiction of the metaverse in Snowcrash demonstrated so many connections between people, technology, and their environments that a blur between these enties. It is this blurring of natural and digital life that AR works to lift out of fiction and bring into our current lived reality.
Jess tells us:
“AR systems process real-time data and user interactions to continuously refine and enhance how users perceive the physical world. This dynamic interaction reflects the core cybernetics principle of a closed-loop system, where input, output, and feedback constantly influence each one another in a cycle of adaptation.”
This form of dynamic feedback is key for play, one of the most essential elements of interaction encouraged in AR face filters.
Play can enable new combinations and possibilities. From play new ideas, concepts, and conversations can emerge – including self-representation in the metaverse.
Play allows us to connect, interaction, and interrogate themes of identity, privacy, and authenticity.
This leaves us with questions about how open ended should creative software be in order to enable play?
Bozzi’s research featured Jess’s expertise alongside other AR artists to better understand the role AR face filters play in the technosocial landscape of social media.
The article leaves us questioning the often unseen role art plays in the creation of digital landscapes, including the near-distant and ever arriving metaverse.
However, just as Bozzi’s research came out, so did news that Meta was shutting down their Spark platform.
This means that now in 2025, AR face filters such as those built by Dr Herrington and other artists that used the Meta Spark platform, closing off these entry points of metaverse co-creation.
What does this mean for artists who have been leading the charge on building the metaverse and taking others along this journey with them?
With artists historically being at the forefront of metaverse creation in the pockets of time where certain entry points have opened up for play, we are left wondering where artists will continue to lead the conversation on the metaverse and how this conversation is related to the tools these artists have access to.
To read more about the School of Cybernetics’ metaverse work, including our exploration of the Metaverse as a cybernetic system and our Backbones and Blueprints report, click here.