by It is the artist Qualeasha Wood, who tells me about Snapchat Dysmorphia, “a term that was shaped by plastic surgeons, who noticed that there was a shift in mid-2010 when people started bringing their AI-custody portraits instead of a celebrity.” To remedy your Snapchat dysmorphia, let your real face rebuilt to look like the ideal version of you, the artificial intelligence on your phone screen.
There is a fundamental problem with it, says Adam Lowe, whose facts in Madrid is at the top of art and technology and documented digital works of art and cultural cultural heritage sites around the world. If you have an operation to look like your best yourself, as shown on a flat screen, the results in the three -dimensional reality can indeed be very strange. You can feel Lowe’s sadness about the way plastic surgery botches human restoration in search of the perfection of the screen: “I have to look away,” he says.
These are the paradoxes of the digital age, which were opened on July 23 in the Somerset House in London. The exhibition brings together more than 20 international artists to examine how artificial intelligence, social media and virtual identities redesign our understanding of beauty and self -representation in the digital age. It feels particularly response as the election of the 25th anniversary of Somerset House at the public opening – the institution has witnessed the full change of our presentation of the world. Wood itself stars -their works of art move into the heart of online life and contrast their selfies with an incessant examination of texts, e -mails and layers of windows on the screen in assembly that capture the unrest of digital existence. But there is a turn. Her snapshots about what it is like to be a strange black woman in social media age are as tapestries. In this older, more extensive medium, the gray frames of the computer windows and the hard labeling of abusive messages become almost contemplative. And here is a hidden story. The digitally controlled weaving is more than 200 years old: the Jacquard web chair, invented in the industrial revolution, was programmed with punch cards which is to be created.
“I was born in 1996, so the internet was already there,” says Wood. “My whole life was conveyed. I got my first computer at the age of five. I was online and played games. The first game I’ve ever played was the Sims and it is a life simulator. The first person I ever knew was my Sim, not a true person.”
As an artist of the selfie age, Kim Kardashian was an inspiration. “Most of my upbringing on the Internet included the use of websites such as Tumblr, only every image-based platform. Working in self-portrait was really natural. I looked at women like Kardashian who were very popular on the Internet at that time even a selfie book.”
The cyborg could soon be a thing of the past, a vision of the future that is already old
Kardashian’s book Egoish is a pioneering moment in the rise of the social media portraits, not least for the provision of the template for “Instagram face”, the cladding, cat -like aesthetics (the appearance was known as a “sexy baby -tiger”), the contemporary beauty standards dominated. The more we shape and spread our own pictures online, the more we feel forced to copy this screen image in the meat. Wood sees virtual beauty as “an era: it is a time marker like BC and AD.
Wood’s art shows how specific the view of the Internet visibility is for them. One of their wall carpets contains a number of aggressive online messages and their answers: “Qualeasha were they born to crack head parents?” “No, both military veterans !!” Under these brick bats, their physical picture is through peaceful, melancholic and provocative twists. True beauty, it insists that it does not turn into a AI product.
“I refuse to contribute to the beauty standard. These works in which I think that I am the least are the people of whom are most beautiful and who find the most beautiful.” Nevertheless, she admits that she is not immune to the ideals of beauty that borrowed everywhere around her. As an artist who shares her own life, she wonders how her image will change over time. “How will it be when I’m 60 and have an older and less perfect body? Even now I am at this age when women start working on it.”
Another piece in the exhibition probably plays one of the most famous bodies of all time. The pose is unmistakable. Even if you have never stood in front of Botticellis The Birth of Venus in the Uffizien gallery in Florence, this naked goddess stands on a huge shell. But in the climatic scene of a film by Sin Wai Kin, Venus is played by the non-binary transgender artist in Drag-Nude Drag-, who thinks in white universities, wet rocks against crashing waves that are distributed around them, like the painted flowers, which are finely falling through Botticelli’s perfumed air.
“It is the idea of the ideal of beauty,” said sin about this recovery of the birth of Venus. In fact, Botticelli knew more than 500 years ago that beauty was “virtual”. The Venus of the 15th century Florentine turns towards them, but never reaches it. The painting does not show her birth, but her arrival by Muse on the island of Cythera. Except how difficult the wind gods, how tenderly a companion is waiting to throw a robe around Venus, never touch their feet. It is real and unreal forever at this moment.
In our age of virtual beauty, people are increasingly trying to cross the border between art and life. As soon as Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement sought to make her life as beautiful as art. You did it through pose and attitude as well as poems and prose. Now we physically sit up again to fit the perfect AI illusion of what we could be.
The Somerset House Show begins with Orlan, the French artist, who was operated on as a performance art in the early 1990s. This radical conversion of your body becomes a pioneering presence of a age in which biology is trumped through technology. Filip ćustić Pi (x) el, a female silicone sculpture from life, shows her face with telephone screens, on which other faces and body, including people who wear scars or visible disabilities, river. Body and screen become one.
Does this path to the digital sky or hell show? The optimistic vision of a new world, in which people can freely invent equipment to meat, could be viewed as a contemporary repetition of Donna Haraway’s famous essay in 1985 (Sin Wai Kin has recorded Haraway quotes in her studio). Perhaps the most comforting interpretation of today’s emerging science fiction reality is that, as Haraway argued, we all become a cyborg part of human, partly machine, which is freed from the oppressive structures of the past.
However, the stumbling block is that the cyborg itself can belong to the past, a vision of the future that is already old. Cyborg dreams assume that we change so much as we change completely, but our body is newly made or replaced. Our mind will always be ours. The human brain will exist, even if it is in a glass with robots that do the dirty work. In truth, however, we may be about to be exceeded by other minds, and our body will be everything we have.
“You get the feeling that a kind of sensations in life is cultivated-but it happens from us,” says Mat Collishaw, a digital artist who takes a much less human-centered view than the artists on virtual beauty. “We don’t really understand it. Even the boys who build it who train it doesn’t really know what happens. If you look into the eyes of a gorilla in the zoo, you know that it feels something there, but it’s not ours: It’s a very strange feeling.”
Although Collishaw began his career as one of the notorious human young British artists in the nineties, he has been working with AI for several years and has now been immersed in such a way that Openai gives him pre -published software for testing. His feeling that the sensation in the machine develops is shared by some of the most respected heads in the industry. If you believe that Google Deepminds Demis Hassabis or “Godfather of Ai” Geoffrey Hinton will lead to artificial general intelligence in the next few years that quickly exceeds our weak human brains. Most jobs will disappear. People will no longer invent or discover anything because machines do it better.
In his most recent film -aftermaths, Collishaw Ki uses to imagine how life could develop again after we have destroyed ourselves. In the fuselage of a crashed aircraft and long -abandoned offices under the sea, shimmering whimpering, sprouting tentacles and cocks, reproducing and mutating, becoming fish -like and then reptile, since millions of years of evolution through its algorithms are unobtrusive in a hypnotic vision of DNAS unobstructed skills.
Collishaw revealed consequences in his latest exhibition Move 37 – a mysterious title unless you followed the development of AI. In 2016 Alphago, a AI system from Hassabis and his team, played the Human Go Master Lee Sedol. In her second game, Alphago won with the playing of Move 37 – a really “creative” step, says the Google Deepmind website with proud of its clever child, who lit faith that inventive “thinking” machines are possible. Nine years later, Hassabis is one of those who believe that artificial general intelligence is imminent. Collishaw feels the presence of something inappropriate in all the hours in which he works closely with AI. He suggests that a mysterious U -boat presence in the current AI systems, “not unlike what happens in the dark water depths in this film”.
Something comes from the abyss. Is it virtual beauty? Or virtual horror? We are all seduced by the strange beauty of the Internet: the speed at which you can see pictures, your high definition and fantastic lively colors; There is even the beauty of the excellently designed devices that we access to this virtual frequency. Perhaps the memorial machines, instead of wiping out of us, will keep us as spoiled pets and manipulate us with our beautiful screens and insidiously enslave us with ever new beauty obsessions.
If so, the exhibition Virtual Beauty suggests that you are good on the way and prepare a future in which we are all the hedonist waste like the people in the science fiction story of JG Ballard, the cloud collectors of corals D., except that we slide through the clouds, we will reserve our way to achieve a perfect beauty. At least it will be something to do.
Virtual beauty is in the Somerset House, London, From July 23 to September 28th.
