Quantum Face Filter

fl(u)id observed that digital platforms don't passively record identity, they produce it. Every interaction with a digital environment is being measured and reduces evolving, plural selfhood into deterministic systems and categories: bits, identifiers, profiles, likes, boxes.

fl(u)id started from a simple observation: self-identity is living, contextual, and plural. Digital identity, as it is currently built, is none of those things.

Rooted in theories of Futures Studies, the project used the hindsight / insight / foresight methodology alongside the PPPP cone and the scenario matrix to map where digital identity had come from, where it was, where it might go, and how it was impacting on self-identity.

Four scenarios for 2050

The four scenarios differ in one thing: who controls whether and how the measuring happens. In the three dystopian scenarios, that control sits outside the individual. In the preferable scenario, the conditions of measurement are treated as a political question, where people own the terms on which they can be observed, and human agency is respected and promoted by technological systems.

This became the design challenge. Following the premise that self-identity is a right and should be a choice, fl(u)id was the speculation:

In quantum mechanics, a system exists in superposition until it interacts with its environment. That interaction forces the wave function to update: the probabilistic description of possible states resolves into a single outcome.

One thing about this especially matters for this project. It is believed that measurement destroys information for good. Once the wave function has been updated, there is no way to recover what it was before.

A quantum state, therefore, cannot be stored the way a database entry is. Identity formed through a quantum interaction is true for this exchange, in this context, and does not carry forward as a fixed fact about you. The architecture structurally resists accumulation.

fl(u)id was the question made into a speculative object. If the current architecture of digital identity accumulates, retains and acts on fixed versions of you without your total ownership, what would a system look like that would offer an alternative?

After the CCI workshop with Astryd Park in late 2024, quantum computing offered a technical substrate for the provocation. It operates on fundamentally different principles than classical computing, principles that make permanent storage of a quantum state hard. If identity formed in a quantum interaction is inherently momentary, true only for that exchange and that context, then data would not accumulate in the way classical systems depend on.

This is where quantum becomes a potential tool for human agency. Q.Filter is a first attempt to make that logic felt. The particles collapse when observed, but they never settle into a final state.

The Quantum Face Filter is a live browser-based prototype built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript using MediaPipe FaceMesh. 468 particles drift in superposition until the moment of observation updates them into form.

Before a face is detected, the particles drift in a diffuse probability cloud. The moment the camera finds a face, the particles update toward the 468 facial landmarks. Observation produces the form.

Even once locked to the face, the particles never fully settle. Each is displaced by an independent sine wave, a simplified analogue of quantum noise, the irreducible randomness that persists even in the most determined states.

Build stack

The browser prototype is a first materialisation of the concept. The work continues with experiments in TouchDesigner to explore richer real-time visual behaviour, and aims to be developed with Quantum Software at some point, to move from simulated quantum noise toward genuinely quantum-generated randomness.

Q.Filter is intended to be a catalyst for asking what systems built on quantum principles might feel like from the inside, and whether that feeling could return something to the people those systems claim to represent. Whether this can scale from a browser prototype into something that genuinely returns data ownership to the individual is part of what the work is still asking.