Artist Es Devlin has created a new installation at the National Portrait Gallery in London titled 'A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery,' made in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab. The work invites people across the UK to upload selfies, which are transformed into charcoal-and-chalk-style portraits using an AI model trained on Devlin's own hand-drawn works. These portraits then appear on a constantly evolving projected carousel, blending and dissolving into one another. Devlin, known for designing visual worlds for Beyoncé, Adele, and the London Olympics closing ceremony, describes the piece as a non-verbal space for coexistence amid national division.
The project matters because it directly addresses contemporary anxieties about AI, attention, and social fragmentation. Devlin has willingly offered her artistic style to train the AI, framing this not as surrender to corporate technology but as an act of reappropriation—'dancing with her own shadow' to resist the isolating forces of algorithmic distraction. At a time when many artists are fighting unauthorized use of their work by AI systems, Devlin's installation proposes a collaborative, imperfect, and human-centered alternative. It also raises urgent questions about the ethics of artists partnering with tech giants like Google, even for ostensibly unifying public art.