I've finally finished (I hope) my self portrait. I started off wanting to have a portrait hidden in a pattern, but I moved on to wanting to involve my love of binary, glitch and generative art. My original idea was to have the portrait emerge from a pattern. The work and my ideas developed through the painting process. (of which I have given a brief account of beneath the painting)I'm attempting to play with elements and layers of identity. Below is the finished piece.

Conway's Loose Life, Oil on canvas, 20" x 24" (51cm x 61cm)

I painted the portrait up to a stage and then photographed it. Uploading the photograph allowed me to play with the photograph digitally. The image was run through a few filters in audacity and had its hexadecimal information altered. The parts of the hexadecimal I altered were converted into binary and were layered on top of painting. Conways game of life rules were applied to the binary on the top third in washes of oil paint. I've placed a really brief video of some of the stages below.

A brief video of the progress of my portrait painting.