The Pictures of DorianGray

The Pictures of Dorian Gray is the first NFT Collection created using Facial Expression Recognition Technology, and the first release in the series is The Pictures of Dorian Gray: Murderabilia is a collection of 1725 unique, non-generated portraits of notorious serial killers from round the world.

The Concept

In Oscar Wilde’s Novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray, the central character sold his soul so that the sins he committed would not affect his own appearance, but instead affect his Portrait. While he was able to maintain an appearance of Eternal Youth,  the painting showed the true state of his Soul.

We realised that by combining Facial Expression Recognition Technology, Psychology and AI Art it would be possible to do something similar: To create a portrait of someone that revealed their inner soul for the world to see.

Murderabilia, focusing on notorious serial killer, is the first in a planned three part series.

Why Serial Killers? We chose serial killers as the first category to focus on as there is a large body of psychological and psychiatric literature in place to compare and calibrate our Facial Expression Recognition Technology against. 

Culturally there is also a huge fascination over serial killers, some commentators believe they have essentially become our modern day Fairy Tales and have replaced the Boogeyman in our collective conscience, so there is a readily built interest and market relating to them. 

How does it work?

Facial Expression Recognition Software accurately analyses the Facial Expressions of people from photographs or video. We used to it to analyse photographs of notorious killers to understand their basic emotions and to ascertain their personality traits.

We then converted the photographs into Artistic representations using AI Art software. As the Art Algorithm is perfectly repeatable and free from human bias, we were able to map the results of the Facial Expression results onto the Artistic interpretations with confidence. In this way we were able to create unique works of Art that function as visual representations of the Person’s soul.

As an added bonus, and as a purely artistic exercise, we have also used AI Art software to convert the representations of the serial killers into different styles of Art. The process modified the physical appearance, age, race, and, in some cases, the genders of the individuals. The idea being to see whether, after removing all the different variables from the equation, would it still be possible on a purely instinctual level to identify or recognise that intangible negative quality that is their essence? Can we, to some extent, isolate and identify ‘Evil’ itself?

Why we believe there is more intrinsic value to our work than many other NFT collections.

There is a huge market for what is called Murderabilia. 

The collection has an historic interest. People remain fascinated by Serial Killers many years into the future making the collection more resistant to changes in fashion than most other NFT brands.

The collection has an intrinsic Scientific value.

The collection has a specific Historic value in that it is the very first collection in history to combine Facial Expression technology with AI Art.

The Pictures of Dorian Gray is also designed to be a persistently expandable brand, able to analyse different groups of cultural icons.