Co-creating workshops, media research, 3D-printing, activist field tests
2023 – ongoing
Embedded in our search for beauty is the desire to be smooth. We want to rid ourselves of imperfections, but when the desire is to be smooth as a set of people or individual person, we exclude features that deviate from the norm. Beauty filters feed into this desire. They give an illusion of individuality by allowing us to seek out specific aesthetics, but often overlay similar alterations that make our skin smooth and shape our faces to fit an universal (usually very femme and west-inspired) standard of beauty. We are now starting to realise the harm of these smoothing filters. The virtual modification has proven to provoke anxiety, cognitive dissonance and body dysmorphia. Its messages permeate life, cause ripples and changes in our interactions with our own bodies and those of others.
Another worrying development concerning filters is the powerful facial recognition software that they use. This recognition is used to make a filter perfectly sit on our face, but I argue that we shouldn’t be happy that it is able to read our face so well. The software is getting so powerful that it is able to read our face from most angles and from a large distance. This means that when you happen to be in the background when someone is taking a selfie with a filter, you might just also be recognized, registered and donned a filter. In this way, you lose all agency over your choice to augment and alter yourself or not.
In an effort to both reject the privacy and autonomy issues of social media’s smoothing, I turn to the abject and un-smooth to keep us safe. Media has for example taught me that stretchmarks are abject, undesirable, something in desperate need of erasing and smoothing. But by employing them as facial recognition hindering masks their obsolescence becomes use and appreciation. In this ongoing project I want look into how we can gently instrumentalize our abject to this end. We are made up of parts, strange parts. Can we embrace those part to reject what has deemed them strange in the first place?