{"id":261255,"date":"2025-07-13T09:43:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-13T09:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/261255\/"},"modified":"2025-07-13T09:43:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-13T09:43:09","slug":"cyborgs-snapchat-dysmorphia-and-ai-led-surgery-has-our-digital-age-ruined-beauty-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/261255\/","title":{"rendered":"Cyborgs, snapchat dysmorphia and AI-led surgery: has our digital age ruined beauty? | Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s the artist Qualeasha Wood who tells me about Snapchat dysmorphia, \u201ca term coined by plastic surgeons<\/a> who noticed there was a shift in the mid 2010s when people started bringing in their AI-beautified portraits instead of a celebrity picture\u201d. To resolve your Snapchat dysmorphia, you get your real face remodelled to look like the ideal version of you that artificial intelligence has perfected on your phone screen.<\/p>\n

There is a fundamental problem with this, says Adam Lowe, whose Factum Foundation in Madrid is at the forefront of art and technology, digitally documenting artworks and cultural heritage sites around the world. When you have surgery to look like your best self as shown on a flat screen, the results in three-dimensional reality can be very odd indeed. You can feel Lowe\u2019s sadness at the way plastic surgery botches human restoration in pursuit of screen perfection: \u201cI have to look away,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

On reflection \u2026 All for U (If U Rlly Want It) by Qualeasha Wood. Photograph: Qualeasha Wood\/ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery<\/p>\n

Such are the paradoxes of the digital age explored in Virtual Beauty<\/a>, an exhibition opening at London\u2019s Somerset House on 23 July. The exhibition brings together more than 20 international artists to examine how artificial intelligence, social media and virtual identities reshape our understanding of beauty and self-representation in the digital age. It feels particularly resonant as the choice for Somerset House\u2019s 25th anniversary of its public opening \u2013 the institution has borne witness to the complete transformation of how we present ourselves to the world. Wood herself stars \u2013 her artworks drag you into the heart of online life, juxtaposing her selfies with a ceaseless churning of texts, emails and layers of onscreen windows in montages that capture the restlessness of digital existence. But there\u2019s a twist. Her snapshots of what it\u2019s like to be a queer Black woman in the social media age are rendered as tapestries. In this older, more substantial medium, the grey frames of computer windows and harsh lettering of abusive messages become almost contemplative. And there is a hidden history here. Digitally controlled weaving is more than 200 years old: the Jacquard loom, invented in the Industrial Revolution, was programmed with punch cards telling what pattern to produce.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was born in 1996 so the internet was already there,\u201d says Wood. \u201cMy whole life has been mediated through that. I got my first computer at the age of five. At six I was online and playing games. The first game I ever played was The Sims, and it\u2019s a life simulator. The first person I ever knew to die was my Sim, not a true human\u00a0being.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making a splash \u2026 A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (still) by Sin Wai Kin (2021). Photograph: Sin Wai Kin\/Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei and Soft Opening, London<\/p>\n

As an artist of the selfie age, one inspiration was Kim Kardashian. \u201cMost of my upbringing on the internet involved using websites like Tumblr, just any image-based platform. Working in self-portraiture was really natural. I was looking at women like Kardashian who were very popular on the internet at that time \u2013 she even produced a selfie book.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0cyborg may soon\u00a0 be a thing of the past, a vision of the future that is already getting old<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kardashian\u2019s 2015 book Selfish is a seminal moment in the rise of social media portraiture, <\/strong>not least for providing the template for \u201cInstagram face\u201d, the plumped up, feline aesthetic (the look was famously described as resembling a \u201csexy baby tiger<\/a>\u201d) that has come to dominate contemporary beauty standards. The more we shape and propagate our own images online, the more we feel\u00a0compelled to copy that screen image in the flesh. Wood sees virtual beauty as \u201can era: it\u2019s a marking of time, like BC and AD. There\u2019s the beauty before technology and filters, and the beauty after. So much of beauty now isn\u2019t about how you see yourself: we look instead at likes and metrics, and how much attention we are receiving or someone else is\u00a0receiving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wood\u2019s art shows how specific the glare of internet visibility is for her. One of her tapestries includes a string of aggressive online messages and her replies \u2013 \u201cQualeasha were you born to Crack head parents?\u201d \u201cNope both military veterans!!\u201d Among these brickbats, her physical image is by turns peaceful, melancholy, provocative. True beauty, she insists, does not lie in transforming yourself into an AI product.<\/p>\n

Human in parts \u2026 Bj\u00f6rk Virtual Avatars by Andrew Thomas Huang and James Merry (2017). Photograph: Andrew Thomas Huang\/James Merry<\/p>\n

\u201cI refuse to contribute to the beauty standard. Those works where I think I\u2019m the least put together are the ones people are most drawn to and find the most beautiful.\u201d Yet she admits she is not immune to the beauty ideals proliferating all around her. As an artist who shares her own life, she wonders how her image\u00a0will\u00a0change with time. \u201cWhat will it be like when\u00a0I\u2019m 60 and have an older and less perfect body? Even now, I\u2019m of that age when women start getting worked\u00a0on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another piece in the exhibition plays off arguably one of the most famous bodies of all time. The pose is unmistakable. Even if you have never stood in front of Botticelli\u2019s The Birth of Venus<\/a> in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, the way this nude goddess stands on a giant shell, legs curved yet with her upper body straight, one hand holding her long golden hair over her groin, another covering her right breast, will be familiar from its endless reproductions. But in the climactic scene of a film by Sin Wai Kin, Venus is played by the non-binary transgender artist in drag \u2013 nude drag \u2013 standing in white high heels on soaking wet rocks against crashing waves, flowers scattered around them like the painted flowers that delicately fall through Botticelli\u2019s perfumed\u00a0air.<\/p>\n

Out on a limb \u2026 Coexist by Arvida Bystr\u00f6m (2022). Photograph: Arvida Bystr\u00f6m<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the idea of the ideal of beauty,\u201d Sin has said of this recreation of The Birth of Venus. In fact, more than 500 years ago, Botticelli knew that beauty was \u201cvirtual\u201d. The 15th-century Florentine artist\u2019s Venus floats towards you but never reaches you. The painting depicts not her birth but her arrival by seashell at the island of Cythera. Except however hard the wind gods puff, however tenderly an attendant waits to throw a robe around Venus, her feet never touch the shore. She is\u00a0suspended for ever in this moment, both real and\u00a0unreal.<\/p>\n

In our age of virtual beauty, people try more and more to cross the boundary between art and life. Once Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement aspired to make their lives as beautiful as art. They did it through pose and poise, as well as poetry and prose. Now we are physically resculpting ourselves to fit the perfect AI illusion of what we might be.<\/p>\n

The Somerset House show begins with Orlan, the French artist who underwent cosmetic surgery as performance art in the early 1990s. That radical remodelling of her body becomes a pioneering foretaste\u00a0of an age in which biology is trumped by technology. Thus Filip \u0106usti\u0107 will show pi(x)el, a female\u00a0silicone sculpture cast from life, her face covered in phone screens, on which other faces and bodies, including people bearing scars or visible disabilities, flow. Body and screen become one.<\/p>\n

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Redeeming features \u2026 pi(x)el by Filip \u0106usti\u0107 (2022). Photograph: Onkaos<\/p>\n

Does this point the way to digital heaven or to hell? The optimistic vision of a new world where people can freely reinvent themselves from device to flesh could be seen as a contemporary restatement of Donna Haraway\u2019s famous 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto (Sin Wai Kin has had Haraway quotes pinned up in their studio). Perhaps the most consoling interpretation of today\u2019s emerging sci-fi reality is that, as Haraway argued, we are all becoming cyborgs \u2013 part human, part machine, liberated from the oppressive structures of the past.<\/p>\n

The stumbling block is, however, that the cyborg itself may be a thing of the past, a vision of the future that is already becoming old. Cyborg dreams assume that however much we change, however completely our bodies are remade or replaced, our minds will always be ours. The human brain will endure, even if it\u2019s in a jar with robots doing the dirty work. However, in truth, we may be about to be outdone by other minds, and our bodies will be all we have left.<\/p>\n

No person is an island \u2026 Virtual Embalming, Mich\u00e8le Lamy by Frederik Heyman (2018). Photograph: Frederik Heyman<\/p>\n

\u201cYou get the sense that some kind of sentience is being nursed into life \u2013 but it\u2019s happening away from us,\u201d says Mat Collishaw, a digital artist who takes a much\u00a0less human-centred view than the artists in Virtual\u00a0Beauty. \u201cWe don\u2019t really understand it. Even the guys that are building it, that are training it, don\u2019t\u00a0really know what\u2019s happening. When you look into the\u00a0eyes of a gorilla in the zoo you know there\u2019s some sentience in there but it\u2019s not ours: it\u2019s a very weird\u00a0feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Collishaw started his career as one of the notoriously human Young British Artists of the 1990s, he has been working for several years with AI, and is now so immersed that OpenAI gives him pre-release software to test. His feeling that sentience is evolving in the machine is shared by some of the industry\u2019s most respected minds. If you believe Google DeepMind\u2019s Demis Hassabis<\/a> or \u201cgodfather of AI\u201d Geoffrey Hinton<\/a>, in the next few years, machine learning will lead to artificial general intelligence that rapidly outdoes our feeble human brains. Most jobs will vanish. Humans will no longer invent or discover anything because machines will do it better.<\/p>\n

In his recent film Aftermaths, Collishaw uses AI to imagine how life might evolve all over again after we destroy ourselves. In the fuselage of a crashed plane and long-abandoned offices beneath the sea, shimmering invertebrates swim, sprouting tentacles and tails, reproducing and mutating, becoming more fishlike, then reptilian, as millions of years of evolution are condensed by his algorithms into a hypnotic vision of DNA\u2019s inexhaustible ability to create new forms of\u00a0life.<\/p>\n

Immersive vision \u2026 Aftermaths 9 by Mat Collishaw (2025). Photograph: Mat Collishaw<\/p>\n

Collishaw unveiled Aftermaths in his recent exhibition Move 37 \u2013 a mysterious title unless you have followed the evolution of AI. In 2016 AlphaGo, an AI system created by Hassabis and his team, played the human Go master Lee Sedol. In their second game, AlphaGo won by playing Move 37 \u2013 a truly \u201ccreative\u201d move, says the Google DeepMind website with pride in its clever child, that kindled a belief that inventive \u201cthinking\u201d machines are possible. Nine years on, Hassabis is among those who think artificial general intelligence is imminent. Collishaw, in all the hours he works intimately with AI, feels the presence of something unnameable. It is, he suggests, a mysterious submarine presence in the current AI systems, \u201cnot dissimilar from what\u2019s happening in the dark watery depths in this film\u201d.<\/p>\n

Something is coming up from the abyss. Is it virtual beauty? Or virtual horror? We are all seduced by the\u00a0strange beauty of the internet: the speed at which\u00a0you\u00a0can see images, their high definition and\u00a0fantastically vivid colours; there\u2019s even the loveliness of the superbly designed devices on which we access this virtual abundance. Maybe the thinking machines, instead of wiping us out, will keep us as pampered pets, manipulating us with our gorgeous screens, insidiously enslaving us with ever new beauty\u00a0obsessions.<\/p>\n

If so, the Virtual Beauty exhibition suggests they are well on the way, preparing a future in which we are all hedonist wastrels like the people in JG Ballard\u2019s sci-fi story The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D. Except rather than\u00a0gliding through the clouds, we will incessantly resculpt ourselves to attain perfect, AI-curated beauty. At least it will be something to do.<\/p>\n

Virtual Beauty is at Somerset House, London, <\/a>from 23\u00a0July to 28 September<\/a>.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the artist Qualeasha Wood who tells me about Snapchat dysmorphia, \u201ca term coined by plastic surgeons who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-261255","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114845280006267855","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}