Year
2021
Tag
Installations
A face appears on a phone. Its features have shifted just enough to remain recognisable, while suggesting that the image could be improved again. The adjustment takes a moment. Learning to expect it can take longer, until the unaltered face begins to look like the version that needs explaining.
Selfie Dysmorphia placed twelve phones in six pairs within a suspended wooden structure. Visitors moved between filtered images and displays that interrupted their promises. The structure gathered an ordinarily private encounter with a front-facing camera into a shared space.
Interactive installation · 730 Hours of Violence · Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona.
Installation documentation · 2021 · Silent excerpt from the exhibition camera archive.
A small instruction about how to look
Beauty filters operate through particular decisions about appearance. A change to skin, proportion or expression can be offered as a playful effect while also carrying a preference for one face over another. Repeated often enough, a preference can become a familiar standard.
The paired phones made room to examine that standard while looking at oneself. One image offered a transformation; its neighbour complicated the invitation. The work did not require visitors to agree on whether a result was attractive. It concerned the quieter authority through which a modification comes to appear desirable in the first place.
A judgement learned from others
Pierre Bourdieu’s account of symbolic violence describes forms of domination that can be reproduced through habits of perception and judgement. Its relevance here lies in the difficulty of separating an apparently personal preference from the social conditions in which that preference was learned.
Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle opens a related question about relationships mediated by images. In the installation, the person and the image were present together, but occupied different positions. The body supplied the face; the screen supplied a version to be considered, compared and potentially preferred.
The distance between two versions
The title belongs to a discussion of filtered self-images taken up in clinical commentary and reporting on social media. The installation offered a cultural encounter with that discussion. It could neither diagnose a visitor nor establish what effect a particular filter would have on them.
Its scale was the interval between two views of the same person. Suspended above the floor, the phones remained visibly attached to a structure, cables and power supplies. The image’s apparent ease was supported by an apparatus. Visitors could move around it, look at its construction, and return to a face whose outline no longer seemed quite as inevitable.
A suspended structure for paired images
Twelve phones were arranged as six pairs within a suspended wooden structure. A steel suspension cable held the assembly above the floor; chargers and two USB power hubs supplied the devices. The paired displays brought the six filters into a face-to-face encounter with each visitor.
Assembly study · An explanatory reconstruction from the exhibition archive. Components are separated for clarity; proportions are illustrative.
Materials & components
- 12 phones arranged as six pairs
- Wooden frame and steel suspension
- Chargers and two USB power hubs
Selected references
- Tate Ryan-Mosley, Beauty filters are changing the way young girls see themselves, MIT Technology Review (2021).
- Susruthi Rajanala and collaborators, Selfies—Living in the Era of Filtered Photographs (2018).
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
- Pierre Bourdieu, Symbolic Violence, in Beyond French Feminisms (2003), pp. 23–26.
Part of 730 Hours of Violence, an exhibition by Domestic Data Streamers at Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona, 7–30 September 2021.
This project received funding through the MediaFutures project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 951962. The work reflects the authors’ views; the European Commission is not responsible for any use of the information.
