In So Many Lines

Every portrait begins with a look. In In So Many Lines, that look belongs to a machine.

Visitors step up to a camera. The system first separates them from the crowd behind them, then hands their image to a generative AI model with a simple brief: keep what makes this face recognisable, and leave out everything else. The result is a minimal line illustration, as few strokes as possible, as many as needed. Nothing is identified and nothing is stored; the face is only read, never remembered.

Then the machine picks up a pen. The drawing is traced down to its centre lines and sent to a pen plotter, which draws it onto a postcard in front of the visitor. Stroke by stroke, it moves, lifts its pen, jumps to another part of the face and returns. In less than a minute, a portrait appears in real ink, on real paper.

Visitors leave with a unique postcard of themselves: a tangible souvenir of an otherwise invisible process, shaped by a face, an algorithm and the small imperfections of pen on paper.

Developed by SAIAR, the research lab of Howest's Digital Design & Development programme (Devine), the installation runs entirely on local, open AI models and custom-built tools. It is a new chapter of an earlier portrait plotter, rebuilt around generative AI. It invites visitors to reflect on how machines perceive us and what they choose to leave out, and to experience AI not as an abstract technology, but as a creative collaborator that never loses the human touch.