It’s the artist Qualeasha Wood who tells me about Snapchat dysmorphia, “a term coined by plastic surgeons who noticed there was a shift in the mid 2010s when people started bringing in their AI-beautified portraits instead of a celebrity picture”. 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.
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’s sadness at the way plastic surgery botches human restoration in pursuit of screen perfection: “I have to look away,” he says.
Such are the paradoxes of the digital age explored in Virtual Beauty, an exhibition opening at London’s 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’s 25th anniversary of its public opening – the institution has borne witness to the complete transformation of how we present ourselves to the world. Wood herself stars – 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’s a twist. Her snapshots of what it’s 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.
“I was born in 1996 so the internet was already there,” says Wood. “My 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’s a life simulator. The first person I ever knew to die was my Sim, not a true human being.”
As an artist of the selfie age, one inspiration was Kim Kardashian. “Most 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 – she even produced a selfie book.”
Kardashian’s 2015 book Selfish is a seminal moment in the rise of social media portraiture, not least for providing the template for “Instagram face”, the plumped up, feline aesthetic (the look was famously described as resembling a “sexy baby tiger”) that has come to dominate contemporary beauty standards. The more we shape and propagate our own images online, the more we feel compelled to copy that screen image in the flesh. Wood sees virtual beauty as “an era: it’s a marking of time, like BC and AD. There’s the beauty before technology and filters, and the beauty after. So much of beauty now isn’t about how you see yourself: we look instead at likes and metrics, and how much attention we are receiving or someone else is receiving.”
Wood’s 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 – “Qualeasha were you born to Crack head parents?” “Nope both military veterans!!” 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.
“I refuse to contribute to the beauty standard. Those works where I think I’m the least put together are the ones people are most drawn to and find the most beautiful.” 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 will change with time. “What will it be like when I’m 60 and have an older and less perfect body? Even now, I’m of that age when women start getting worked on.”
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’s The Birth of Venus 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 – nude drag – 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’s perfumed air.
“It’s the idea of the ideal of beauty,” Sin has said of this recreation of The Birth of Venus. In fact, more than 500 years ago, Botticelli knew that beauty was “virtual”. The 15th-century Florentine artist’s 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 suspended for ever in this moment, both real and unreal.
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.
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 of an age in which biology is trumped by technology. Thus Filip Ćustić will show pi(x)el, a female silicone 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.
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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’s 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’s emerging sci-fi reality is that, as Haraway argued, we are all becoming cyborgs – part human, part machine, liberated from the oppressive structures of the past.
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’s 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.
“You get the sense that some kind of sentience is being nursed into life – but it’s happening away from us,” says Mat Collishaw, a digital artist who takes a much less human-centred view than the artists in Virtual Beauty. “We don’t really understand it. Even the guys that are building it, that are training it, don’t really know what’s happening. When you look into the eyes of a gorilla in the zoo you know there’s some sentience in there but it’s not ours: it’s a very weird feeling.”
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’s most respected minds. If you believe Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis or “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton, 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.
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’s inexhaustible ability to create new forms of life.
Collishaw unveiled Aftermaths in his recent exhibition Move 37 – 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 – a truly “creative” move, says the Google DeepMind website with pride in its clever child, that kindled a belief that inventive “thinking” 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, “not dissimilar from what’s happening in the dark watery depths in this film”.
Something is coming up 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 images, their high definition and fantastically vivid colours; there’s 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 obsessions.
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’s sci-fi story The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D. Except rather than gliding through the clouds, we will incessantly resculpt ourselves to attain perfect, AI-curated beauty. At least it will be something to do.
Virtual Beauty is at Somerset House, London, from 23 July to 28 September.
