The human smile is a universally recognisable expression. It evolved from the fear grin found in primates, who bare their teeth to dominant group members in a display of submissive, unthreatening behaviour. The modern smile still carries the echo of this, and is often used in greeting, signalling an open friendliness. While it usually denotes positive emotions, it has developed into an expression far more complex than its forebear, with meanings shifting depending on, cultural interpretation, situation, eye contact and a myriad of accompanying micro expressions.

Transitioning from these primal origins of the smile to our contemporary digital landscape reveals a fascinating evolution. Historically, the smile served as a non-verbal cue, deeply rooted in biological and social functions. Today as we navigate our increasingly complex online environment, the bandwidth for traditional social signalling narrows, yet these ingrained expressions find new life in the pixels of our online avatars and profiles. This shift from physical to virtual does not simply replicate traditional expressions but transforms them, adapting to the subtleties of digital communication. A new spectrum of non-verbal social languages has emerged, influencing how we represent ourselves online. From Instagram pages and dating profiles to targeted adverts and YouTube thumbnails, brands and individuals curate the facial expressions displayed based on a desire for greater connectivity. In the centre of this strange new world of digital social cues and interactions sits the PFP. Like IRL facial expressions, PFPs have evolved to quickly deliver complex information about the subject. Rather than simply replacing traditional facial cues, they also serve other functions equally ingrained in our social evolution, signalling everything from tribal affiliations to socio-economic status. This shift illustrates not just a change in how we communicate but also in how we construct and perceive identity in a digital age.

Smile, Rainisto’s first PFP collection, represents his attempt to subvert and move beyond the conventional PFP meta. Rather than follow the standard playbook of team, utility & roadmap, Rainisto is explicit in reducing the deliverables down to the core art, using the form to examine our need to express and our search for connection, as well as the fundamental role technology plays in shaping our interactions. Originally born out of a desire to explore the discomfort around his own photographed smile, Rainisto deployed generative AI, using a custom Stable Diffusion model to create Smile, curating the output down from 100,000 images to a collection of 5000. From that very personal beginning, a host of other, more existential questions begin to present themselves. What happens when AI is tasked with replicating a human smile? How will the output make us feel? What will the Algorithm recognise as a smile? Can a sufficiently large data set take the place of inherited social understanding?

The results are unsurprisingly incredibly unique, but perhaps more so, they are also hugely compelling. Existing at the axis of art, technology, and our desire for contact, Smile is a body of work that is both timeless and of the moment, showing how powerful tools like AI can be when employed thoughtfully rather than used simply because they are available. At once unsettling, playful, beautiful, and ugly, the outputs vary from the photographic, to the impressionistic to the grotesque. One image might whisper a smile in Rothko-like abstraction while the next seems to twist it out of its subject, feeling almost Baconesque. Parts of the work could be drawing aesthetic parallels with the photography of Alexis Dibiasio and Ernie Glam, whose practice chronicled the NY Club Kids scene, and still other corners of the collection are simply, in Rainisto’s own words, ‘pure’ Smiles. It’s far more diverse stylistically than any other PFP collection, but it remains cohesive, united by a concept that anchors it more thoroughly to the PFPs purpose than anything else that’s come before it.

Smile is an art piece masquerading as a PFP project. The work lies in not just the single image, or the entire collection, but in the combination of media, the subject and the format. With Life in West America and Reworld, Rainisto established himself as a key figure in AI & Digital Art and Smile further serves to cement his position, not just at the forefront of these movements but as an artist capable of distilling a myriad of complex and often divisive themes into a simple unifying image. What is more universally understood than the human smile? By using AI to reflect and examine our own identity, he invites us to confront the nuances of our contemporary existence. In an era increasingly shaped by digital innovation, and where anxiety around AI development grows, harnessing this technology to ask such fundamentally human questions feels especially poignant. As Rainisto puts it himself on the collection’s homepage, ‘A smile is an invitation to connect with us.’ Placing this theme at the centre of the work, and releasing the series as a PFP collection, is a wonderfully thoughtful examination of what it means to interact as a human in an increasingly digital environment, and perhaps more pertinently, how that environment might attempt to interact with us.

You can find Roope Rainisto on X here and more information on Smile here.

The human smile is a universally recognisable expression. It evolved from the fear grin found in primates, who bare their teeth to dominant group members in a display of submissive, unthreatening behaviour. The modern smile still carries the echo of this, and is often used in greeting, signalling an open friendliness. While it usually denotes positive emotions, it has developed into an expression far more complex than its forebear, with meanings shifting depending on, cultural interpretation, situation, eye contact and a myriad of accompanying micro expressions.

Transitioning from these primal origins of the smile to our contemporary digital landscape reveals a fascinating evolution. Historically, the smile served as a non-verbal cue, deeply rooted in biological and social functions. Today as we navigate our increasingly complex online environment, the bandwidth for traditional social signalling narrows, yet these ingrained expressions find new life in the pixels of our online avatars and profiles. This shift from physical to virtual does not simply replicate traditional expressions but transforms them, adapting to the subtleties of digital communication. A new spectrum of non-verbal social languages has emerged, influencing how we represent ourselves online. From Instagram pages and dating profiles to targeted adverts and YouTube thumbnails, brands and individuals curate the facial expressions displayed based on a desire for greater connectivity. In the centre of this strange new world of digital social cues and interactions sits the PFP. Like IRL facial expressions, PFPs have evolved to quickly deliver complex information about the subject. Rather than simply replacing traditional facial cues, they also serve other functions equally ingrained in our social evolution, signalling everything from tribal affiliations to socio-economic status. This shift illustrates not just a change in how we communicate but also in how we construct and perceive identity in a digital age.

Smile, Rainisto’s first PFP collection, represents his attempt to subvert and move beyond the conventional PFP meta. Rather than follow the standard playbook of team, utility & roadmap, Rainisto is explicit in reducing the deliverables down to the core art, using the form to examine our need to express and our search for connection, as well as the fundamental role technology plays in shaping our interactions. Originally born out of a desire to explore the discomfort around his own photographed smile, Rainisto deployed generative AI, using a custom Stable Diffusion model to create Smile, curating the output down from 100,000 images to a collection of 5000. From that very personal beginning, a host of other, more existential questions begin to present themselves. What happens when AI is tasked with replicating a human smile? How will the output make us feel? What will the Algorithm recognise as a smile? Can a sufficiently large data set take the place of inherited social understanding?

The results are unsurprisingly incredibly unique, but perhaps more so, they are also hugely compelling. Existing at the axis of art, technology, and our desire for contact, Smile is a body of work that is both timeless and of the moment, showing how powerful tools like AI can be when employed thoughtfully rather than used simply because they are available. At once unsettling, playful, beautiful, and ugly, the outputs vary from the photographic, to the impressionistic to the grotesque. One image might whisper a smile in Rothko-like abstraction while the next seems to twist it out of its subject, feeling almost Baconesque. Parts of the work could be drawing aesthetic parallels with the photography of Alexis Dibiasio and Ernie Glam, whose practice chronicled the NY Club Kids scene, and still other corners of the collection are simply, in Rainisto’s own words, ‘pure’ Smiles. It’s far more diverse stylistically than any other PFP collection, but it remains cohesive, united by a concept that anchors it more thoroughly to the PFPs purpose than anything else that’s come before it.

Smile is an art piece masquerading as a PFP project. The work lies in not just the single image, or the entire collection, but in the combination of media, the subject and the format. With Life in West America and Reworld, Rainisto established himself as a key figure in AI & Digital Art and Smile further serves to cement his position, not just at the forefront of these movements but as an artist capable of distilling a myriad of complex and often divisive themes into a simple unifying image. What is more universally understood than the human smile? By using AI to reflect and examine our own identity, he invites us to confront the nuances of our contemporary existence. In an era increasingly shaped by digital innovation, and where anxiety around AI development grows, harnessing this technology to ask such fundamentally human questions feels especially poignant. As Rainisto puts it himself on the collection’s homepage, ‘A smile is an invitation to connect with us.’ Placing this theme at the centre of the work, and releasing the series as a PFP collection, is a wonderfully thoughtful examination of what it means to interact as a human in an increasingly digital environment, and perhaps more pertinently, how that environment might attempt to interact with us.

You can find Roope Rainisto on X here and more information on Smile here.