Different Stages of Beautification

The work was part of spam-index `s online pavilion “Desktop studies” for The Wrong Biennale 2023 using  newart.city platform to host it online.

“Different Stages of Beautification” serves as a thought-provoking exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI) influences our perceptions of femininity and identity, shedding light on the complex interplay between technology and societal perceptions.

The first video is an AI animation, created from the input that was written as a description: a woman putting on make-up in the style of watercolor. The AI autonomously decided to put a beauty filter on, in contrast to other specifications that were tested before, such as a woman touching her face, a woman touching herself, or a woman looking into the camera. Anastasia voluntarily decided to feed the machine learning algorithm her personal data to test the results using her own face and a small part of another of her works, emphasizing the technology’s power to either reinforce or reshape societal beauty ideals.

The second video represents the artist`s head and hand covered in green screen costume, putting on makeup. This imagery opens up a world of possibilities for reshaping and customizing one’s identity. The absent body parts represent placeholders for potential transformations, driven by AI and sourced from the vast expanse of the internet.

The work addresses the pervasive trend of beauty filters embedded within phone cameras by default, as you need to go to the General Settings on your phone to deactivate them. Many individuals unconsciously and unknowingly adopt these filtered images as their self-image, leading to a dissonance between how they perceive themselves through their own cameras and their unaltered appearance in other people`s photos. This dissonance can induce feelings of dysphoria. As Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote for the Atlantic, AI will create beautiful humans without any physical description even being written, as more and more edited images are fed to it.

The notion that the green screen face serves as a canvas for self-creation exemplifies the potential of AI and internet-sourced imagery as blueprints for constructing online avatars or even guiding decisions related to plastic surgery.