There’s a saying circulating on the web that we’re by no means meant to see our faces as a lot as we do now. Our ancestors from days of outdated noticed their blurry reflections in water. Later got here the invention of the mirror, then the digital camera, and now there’s social media, exposing us to numerous faces day-after-day. Some are edited and distorted, pushed by algorithms telling us what’s trending and must be thought of lovely. You might need come throughout phrases like looksmaxing or Instagram face – a particular aesthetic with full lips, cat-like eyes, excessive cheekbones, lengthy lashes, and a small nostril. Usually racially ambiguous, borrowing magnificence facets from numerous ethnicities, it has a cyborgian essence, a homogenised look that may be achieved by way of make-up, aesthetic procedures, or good picture enhancing instruments.
It’s a distorted view which will be traced again to limitless publicity to selfies, resulting in a sort of Snapchat dysmorphia – a social media phenomenon fuelled by unrealistic magnificence requirements. We’re hyper-aware in how we current ourselves.
Hyungkoo Lee. Altering Facial Options with WH5 (2010).
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of artist)
These advanced modifications to magnificence within the digital world are explored in Digital Beauty, a brand new exhibition at Somerset Home that includes the work of over 20 worldwide artists working throughout pictures, video, installations, and sculpture. They discover our new on-line actuality, questioning who holds the facility in defining magnificence when social media filters, AI, relationship apps, and biometrics are reshaping our understanding of id, race, gender, and sexuality. The works delve into dystopian themes, nostalgia, and the surreal, shifting between previous, current, and future.
‘Digital Magnificence is attempting to carry extra questions than giving solutions. We speak lots about self-representation, desirous about the important thing components that outline magnificence at this time. Not solely how totally different applied sciences play a job, but additionally how social media and fashionable tradition affect us on each psychological and bodily ranges,’ says Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, who co-curated the exhibition with Mathilde Friis and Bunny Kinney.
A part of Somerset Home’s twenty fifth birthday program, the present addresses pressing points from a singular perspective. ‘If we began curating Digital Magnificence at this time, the outcomes a yr from now would look totally different as a result of every thing is continually altering, particularly with know-how and what number of artists are utilizing new instruments to precise themselves and create work,’ Kinney says.
Arvida Byström – Concord (2022)
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of artist)
The brand new era coming of age has grown up in a world the place curating digital identities is a continuing a part of each day life. ‘We’re noticing that younger individuals on Instagram and TikTok are utilizing these digital instruments in new methods and redefining what magnificence appears to be like like. It doesn’t resemble the normal thought of magnificence. It’s a extra radical, bizarre, and fantastical model, breaking away from the industry-driven requirements set by a bunch of white males in fits sitting within the boardroom deciding tendencies,’ Kinney provides.
The exhibition is split into three sections. The primary covers the final 20 years and traces the early phases of digital self-representation – on show in a glass case is a relic of recent occasions: a silver Samsung flip cellphone from 2003. It’s one of many first cell phones with a built-in digital camera, paving the way in which for front-facing selfies. The selfie’s energy is now simple, as Kim Kardashian can attest, having capitalised on her selfies in her 2015 ebook Egocentric. Like different members of her household, the Kardashians have influenced modern magnificence requirements and aesthetic tendencies regardless of their scandals.
In the identical room are works by ORLAN titled Omniprésence (1992). 4 images and a video of an operatic nature doc her seventh medial efficiency, broadcast publicly in galleries and museums, asking viewers for suggestions. The cosmetic surgery was meant to problem Western magnificence beliefs and lift questions on social taboos and unreachable aesthetic requirements. It reveals a grim actuality of beauty procedures, foreshadowing how plastic surgeons now put up before-and-after photographs or movies of surgical procedures to thousands and thousands on social media, even creating memes like Dr. Miami.
Amalia Ulman. Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Replace, 1st June 2014) (2015). Courtesy of the artist and Deborah Schamoni.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of artist)
Qualeasha Wooden’s giant and putting embroidered tapestry, It’s All For U (If U Rlly Need It) (2024), blends conventional textile methods with digital aesthetics. It questions how the id of the Black femme physique is portrayed in digital areas, usually misrepresented or erased. Difficult the commodification of the physique, she features a webcam selfie of herself to spotlight the tumultuous relationship between self-expression and social media’s intensive affect.
Elsewhere, AI is taken into account, as a instrument to boost, alter and refashion the physique. Works within the assortment discover how such applied sciences have gone mainstream, together with what will be thought of innocent in AI picture enhancing apps. One work that’s unimaginable to overlook is Arvida Byström’s set up A Daughter With out a Mom (2022), that includes a feminine intercourse doll mendacity on the ground. The artist outfitted the discarded doll with AI speech-generation software program, modifying it to function exterior home and sexual contexts. Whereas analysing how AI can reinforce the sexualisation and objectification of the feminine physique, Byström encourages viewers to replicate on the complexities of id and intimacy linked to human-shaped mechanisms.
The three-channel movie Previous Life (2021), created by Ben Cullen Williams in collaboration with visionary make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench, was made on account of a public open name. Members posed in sure methods and utilized make-up from particular directions, after which their photographs entered a Generative Adversarial Community (GAN). The AI generated a collection of movies that includes distorted, altered faces, pushing past conventional magnificence requirements into a brand new, unsettling aesthetic of the human kind.
Qualeasha Wooden. It’s All For U (If U Rlly Need It) (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of artist)
What would possibly magnificence and need would possibly appear like in a technologised future? With the rise of transportable units, gaming, streaming environments, and social media platforms, one area within the exhibition acts as a microcosm of a future digital world. Extra individuals are growing alternate personas by way of 3D-scanned digital our bodies and modeled avatars in digital areas, and these developments are reworking perceptions of magnificence and id. ‘The exhibition completes a circuit between the digital and the actual world. It is an exploration about how digital tradition and know-how have an effect on us in on a regular basis life,’ says Dr. Cliff Lauson, Director of Exhibitions at Somerset Home.
Each profound and thought-provoking, Digital Magnificence leaves one questioning if within the the relentless pursuit of magnificence, we’re extra weak on-line than ever earlier than.
Digital Magnificence is at Somerset Home till 28 September
Minne Atairu. Blonde Braids Research II (2023)
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of artist)
TOPICS
Supply: Wallpaper
