AIC Aesthetic Intelligence Circle
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Gathering 04 · Selected Works

The Faceless Selfie

June 25, 2026 · Gallery House, Menlo Park

An AI art workshop exploring identity through symbols, images, and the stories behind them.

From the Evening

A workshop built through art, conversation, and reflection

We began with contemporary portraits and artworks where the face was hidden, replaced, or symbolically transformed. Participants then moved through a prompt sequence to identify meaningful objects, places, memories, and metaphors before shaping them into images with AI.

Worksheets and prompts prepared for The Faceless Selfie workshop.
Participants seated in a circle during AIC #4 at Gallery House.
A participant sharing her faceless selfie during AIC #4.

The Outputs

Images that became self-portraits through story

The images below were created during the workshop. What mattered was not only what participants made, but the meaning they uncovered while making it.

An AI-generated image of a figure partially obscured by a tree, with childhood toys held within the branches.
Anonymous participant, Designer This image holds vulnerability within a larger field of life. The childhood toy remains, carried by the tree's vitality, as if insecurity itself could be held rather than hidden.
An AI-generated image of a retired professor and physician surrounded by signs of lifelong care, family, travel, and artistic practice.
Anonymous participant, Professor and Physician This image imagines healing as something that does not end with a career. The passport points to the many times he traveled to Africa to care for others, while the life around him suggests that this impulse to heal remains, only in different forms.
An AI-generated image of an engineer at sea holding a compass over his face, with cliffs and a distant ship behind him.
Anonymous participant, Engineer This image imagines a life guided less by certainty than by direction. Inspired by Steve Jobs's pirate spirit, it turns the self into a compass, choosing how to move even while already at sea.
An AI-generated image of an engineer holding a compass toward the horizon, surrounded by notes about curiosity, learning, and continuing forward.
Anonymous participant, Engineer This image carries the quiet courage of someone who chose uncertainty over stability. After leaving a secure path and starting over in engineering, she keeps moving forward with effort, curiosity, and trust that clarity comes through continuing.
An AI-generated image of an engineer surrounded by scenes of departure, reflection, code, and walking beside a partner, with a compass in the foreground.
Anonymous participant, Engineer This image gathers the many choices that have shaped a life in motion: the goodbye at the airport, the late-night hours of writing code, the long walks of talking through what kind of future to build. It holds both confusion and becoming, as if each season of pain is also making room for a different self to emerge.
An AI-generated portrait of a participant whose face is filled with flowers, stars, music, and paper forms, suggesting an inner world of beauty and wonder.
Anonymous participant, Finance This image feels like the private, romantic world that survives beneath a life shaped by analysis and discipline. It holds a tenderness toward light, beauty, and possibility, as if even in a highly structured world, part of her is still walking toward wonder.
An AI-generated portrait of an engineer whose face is composed of flowers, music, paper, and stars, suggesting the inner world she carries with her.
Anonymous participant, Engineer This image feels like a self assembled from what she loves: music, language, wonder, memory, and making. Even after leaving journalism for engineering, her inner world remains intact, not erased by the transition but carried into it.
An AI-generated portrait of an artist with a large white flower obscuring the face, surrounded by roses and birds.
Anonymous participant, Artist This image turns flowers and birds into a language of selfhood. It carries a quiet femininity, as if beauty, tenderness, and aliveness are not around her, but part of who she is.

Related Writing

The reflection behind this gathering

For a deeper reflection on what this workshop revealed about identity, metaphor, and meaning in the age of AI, read the companion essay.

Read The Faceless Selfie