In December 2022, I joined the viral throng of people creating ‘Magic Avatars’ on the AI app called Lensa. In its funhouse wheel of possible filters (Cyber punk? Kawaii? Fairy Princess?), remixed with a selfie to produce fantastical — yet recognizable — self-portraits in a matter of minutes, I felt a powerful creative opening. Characters grew from the images I saw; I took pen to paper and sketched out holograms for entire worlds and storylines. For Christmas that year, I gave my brother and his girlfriend a book of love stories with their ‘Magic Avatars’ as the central characters of little vignettes. The funhouse wheel and its neon-colored ride came to an abrupt halt when it turned out (to absolutely no one’s surprise?), that our $5.99 and faces had been fed to a Russian developer rife with murky data terms, stolen work from artists, and the harvesting of biometric data. With this awareness, the magic ended, or, maybe, this was the larger effect of the real magic I felt: it lifted the app into the bright light of the collective gaze; the lens opened to illuminate the obscured underbelly.
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