How can an interactive documentary staged on a user’s own face help expose the hidden logics of surveillance capitalism?

What experience are we trying to understand?

The Hololabs team explored what happens when a person’s body becomes the interface. Built with Meta’s SparkAR (since discontinued), this Instagram face filter playfully satirized “The Metaverse” by asking users to blink, smile, or frown to trigger effects. These actions mirrored Meta’s extractive practices, from smiling harder to earn cryptocurrency to watching Mark Zuckerberg’s profits increase in real time.

What are the early results?

Participants described feeling both amused and unsettled. Having their face replaced with emojis or strangers’ photos produced moments of friction inside their otherwise seamless social feeds. This led to what the team calls context jamming: subversive, personalized interruptions that expose the mechanics of algorithmic media.

What needs more research?

The project highlighted the fragility of interventions within corporate platforms. SparkAR’s eventual shutdown erased the work entirely. The team is left asking: how can critical creators continue to operate inside infrastructures they don’t control, and how might speculative play help imagine alternatives beyond them?