ID 2.100.
2023
In-game photography
Photomaton, ePhoto
10 × 15 cm
IID 2.100. uses the “residence permit photo” mode of an ePhoto-enabled Photomaton booth to produce ID photographs of avatars created inside multiplayer video games. The avatars are carefully modelled after images of refugees and forcibly displaced people published by international photojournalists.
Each image follows the protocol of a standard identity photograph, receives a digital ePhoto code and passes through an administrative biometric-image infrastructure normally reserved for physical bodies. The project asks what constitutes a portrait today: the material photograph on our papers, the virtual avatar, or the sum of our images scattered across games, social networks and state identification systems.
ID 2.100. is a conceptual photographic series by Maxim Zmeyev that uses the “residence permit photo” mode of an ePhoto-enabled Photomaton booth to produce ID photographs of avatars created inside multiplayer video games. The avatars are carefully modelled after images of refugees and forcibly displaced people published by international photojournalists. Each image follows the protocol of a standard identity photograph, receives a digital ePhoto code and passes through an administrative biometric-image infrastructure normally reserved for physical bodies.
The project begins from a collision between two systems of recognition. In online games, the avatar is a chosen body: an interface for movement, exchange, labour, play and social contact. In the administrative photograph, the face becomes a standardised image, detached from biography but tied to legal access — to residence, work, movement, healthcare and protection. ID 2.100. places one image regime inside another: the avatar, usually designed for fiction and play, is submitted to a bureaucratic protocol that asks it to behave like evidence.
When the virtual face enters the Photomaton booth, the portrait ceases to be only a screen image. It becomes a document-shaped object, marked by the friction between a digital body and a machine built to register physical presence. The artefacts, distortions and failures produced by this encounter become part of the work. They show how identity is not simply represented by an image, but produced through formats, codes, machines and administrative expectations.
The title follows the internal coding system of Zmeyev’s practice. ID refers both to the identity document and to identity itself — not only a card, but a constructed self. 2 marks the artist’s second project with in-game photography. 100 refers to the one hundred avatar portraits in the series and echoes the historical threshold reported by UNHCR in 2023, when more than 100 million people worldwide were recorded as forcibly displaced. A separate cover image, showing the apparatus of production, remains outside this count.
The work does not attempt to replace or directly represent the people whose images serve as visual references. Instead, it displaces their media visibility into another regime of image production, where the face is reconstructed, standardised and converted into a bureaucratic image. The avatars are not substitute identities; they expose how identities are produced by systems that assign, verify and circulate faces.
ID 2.100. asks what constitutes a portrait today: the material photograph printed on our papers, the virtual avatar we construct, the biometric image formatted for the state, or the sum of our images scattered across games, social networks, databases and systems of identification.