You’ve got to love Italian artist Dito Von Tease. The artist has put his digits to even more impressive use by turning them into lifelike recreations of famous faces. The inventive Italian, from Bologna, has produced versions of everyone from Dalai Lama and Jesus to Colonel Gaddafi and Hitler…The 33-year-old artist has transformed his digits into characters.Dito Von Tease has made his fingers look like recognisable faces from the Dalai Lama to Steve Jobs. He works under the pseudonym Dito Von Tease, in reference to the burlesque dancer Dita and because ‘il dito’ means ‘the finger’. The ‘Ditology’ project aims to look at our sense of identity and how we use disguises – particularly when we leave a ‘digital fingerprint’ online.“I used this metaphor to say we all try to hide ourselves behind an image of us we create. That’s my finger, the changing masks everybody wears in playing life… especially famous people.” The characters are chosen from daily news and important happenings, historical events, arts, music, television and politics. Von Tease changes the skin colour and adds hairstyles, distinctive features and even make up. The Ditology project also taps into the importance of the index finger in today’s digital world – where many of us use our index finger to operate touchscreens. So if you want to examine your own ‘digital identity’, perhaps it is time to turn back to finger painting. “I started the Ditology-project in 2009, when I decided to create my account on the Facebook. I wanted this to become a virtual space to be free from relatives, colleagues and not-very-friends. That’s why I decided to create an avatar. In Italian someone could say I wanted to “hide myself behind my finger” (trans. “nascondermi dietro un dito”): it’s a metaphor to indicate a not-very-effective hiding place! My desire to hide myself from real life made me think about people’s identity and mine. So I used the image of a finger to suggest that we all try to hide ourselves behind an image of us we create. That’s my finger: the representation of the changing masks everybody wears in playing life… probably to preserve the fragile individual uniqueness of our finger-print”. For more pictiures, information or to get in touch with the artist, just follow the link below.
