manifest.
Eight theses on FACE & FICTION, an ongoing self-portrait project since 2021.
The self-portrait is interpolated
The body in the image is not my body. It is computed from me – a statistical approximation, neither staging nor disguise. I supply the training data; the machine interpolates.
Every image has a birth certificate
Work ID, model, seed, steps, guidance, CFG scale, LoRA, SHA-256 hash, prompt and negative prompt. The image is not an autonomous work but a documented computational operation. The provenance block is part of the work, not a caption.
The machine is named
stable-diffusion.cpp, running locally on my own hardware. Model, text encoder, VAE and LoRA are listed with every single image. There is no artist myth – only an operator who sets parameters and answers for them.
Gloss is a tool
The aristocrat in a baroque white robe, the king in ermine, the cowboy at the fence: some images court glamour on purpose. The provenance beside them undercuts it. Every pose is a parameter.
The body was always construction
In the Antikensaal of Mannheim Palace (KI-KÖRPERKULT, 2024) AI bodies hung between Roman busts and Greek vases. The marble body was never allowed to admit it was constructed. These bodies were born as construction – and say so.
Identity is a cloud
The self is not a fortress but a cloud of possible states. Whoever accepts this can generate himself as cowboy or aristocrat without losing himself.
Art is a strategy of survival
Not therapy – the competence to choose parameters. That is what authorship can still be in an algorithmic age.
Ludwigshafen remains the ground
Working-class child, Catholicism, BASF steam, the Walzmühle, demolished in 1993. The industrial hometown gives the algorithmic practice its sobriety. Whoever knows the margins distrusts images that pretend to be natural.
Timo Schuster, Berlin, October 2026
Provenance · Behind the images · About