Are We the Gods of Our Own Image? Notes on the Virtual Beauty Exhibition (Somerset House 2025) Part 2 (Sections V-VIII)

 

Qualeasha Wood: It's All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024) [a]

Arvida Byström: A Daughter Without a Mother (2022) [b] 

 

Photos taken by Maria Thanassa on her i-Phone at the 

Virtual Beauty exhibition (2025): somersethouse.org.uk

 

'We used to check our reflections in bathroom mirrors. Now, we check them in selfies ... on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. 

A flick of the screen shows our face, but a little smoother, a little more symmetrical, with a glow. 

In this world, we don’t just see ourselves. We edit ourselves. We curate.' - Matthilde Friis

 

Part One of this post (sections I - IV) can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

V.

 

One of the curators of the Somerset House summer exhibition - Virtual Beauty (23 July - 28 September 2025) - Mathilde Friis, has written a short essay in which she argues that at the heart of the show is a political question; not whether "beauty is liberating or constraining, but how we use it, and who gets to decide" [c].

 

It's almost as if she substitutes the word beauty for another word; one beginning with 'p' that many of those exploring issues around visual culture, sexuality, gender and identity from a post-feminist and post-Foucauldian perspective still insist is the great clue to everything: power.   

 

The problem with this is it's easy to become entangled within a discursive network of power and easy to conceive of the latter in a rather old-fashioned (overly simplistic) manner that fails to recognise its simulated nature and its ultimate dissolution into a realm of seduction and signs without referents (as Baudrillard would say) [d]. 

 

Power is not an underlying structure; nor is it a thing that one can possess and wield. The minute you use the word power in all sincerity you have failed to grasp that it's a kind of convenient fiction and, whether you intend to or not, you reify power as a static entity or object that can be analysed. 

 

And so, if we are to become the playful "makers of our own image" [e], as Friis suggests, let it be in the name of something else other than power/knowledge (one is almost tempted to suggest impotence and forgetfulness).  

 

VI.

 

The strange thing with the Virtual Beauty exhibition is just how indebted to the past it felt at times: a sneaky reference to Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto (1985) here; a little bit of Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth (1990) hinted at there. 

 

Matthilde Friis mentions both authors and both books in her essay. Admitting the limitations of cyberfeminism - techno-utopias tend to always bump against the limits of physical reality - she also wonders if the digital world really offers endless opportunities for reinvention and liberation, or just the same old bullshit repackaged and recycled; "are we escaping the beauty myth, or just rewriting its code?" [f].   

 

Probably the latter: 

 

"The internet didn't erase gender or racial boundaries. It replicated them. Platforms that promised liberation were embedded with old biases. While the medium was new, the pressures remained the same." [g]

 

Thus, whilst beauty in 2025 may no longer just be about makeup, fashion, and hairstyle - but also "pixels, data, and code" [h] - old standards and stereotypes persist and old concerns to do with sexual objectification, for example, or how beauty still plays upon certain racial characteristics, return to trouble us anew. 

 

And so we come to the two works I wish to briefly discuss here: firstly, Qualeasha Wood's It’s All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024); and, secondly, Arvida Byström's A Daughter Without A Mother (2022) ... 

 

 

VII.

 

Some readers might be wondering if, as a straight white cis male, I'm qualified - or even entitled - to comment on the work of black queer artist Qualeasha Wood. I understand the concern and admit that there's a racial and sexual history here which, as Mysia Anderson says, simply must be acknowledged and taken into account [i].   

 

Having said that, however, it would seem absurd to pretend I hadn't seen and didn't very much like Wood's contribution to the Virtual Beauty exhibition; a clever and amusing combination of traditional textile techniques and glitch aesthetics [j] that exposes (and critiques) how the femme body is shaped, commodified, and circulated online via popular social media platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. 

 

Her tapestry cleverly reclaims her own image and, fabricated as it is in woven jacquard (embroidered with glass seed beads), it constitutes a form of defiance to (and subversion of) the relentless digital age and its beloved glass screens.  

 

The medium is the message, as everyone used to say ... [k]

 

  

VIII. 

 

I will always have time for works which involve the use of dolls; some readers may recall my fascination with Amber Hawk Swanson's Amber Doll project (2007-10), for example, that I posted about back in 2013 and which the artist details on her website here. 

 

And so I was naturally drawn to the work of Arvida Byström, a young Swedish artist and photographer who, according to a recent press release, "travels in an aesthetic universe of disobedient bodies, fruits in lingerie, tulips and AI sex dolls" [l].

 

A Daughter Without A Mother (2022) is a mixed media installation that, on the one hand, critically examines how even AI can be used to replicate sexual stereotypes and thus collaborate in the pornification of the female body (and, indeed, the entire culture), whilst, on the other hand, inviting viewers to "contemplate the complexities of identity and intimacy" [m] associated with realistic looking sex dolls.     

 

I wouldn't say it's a great work: or even her best work. But it does return us to a question she has raised before concerning female fantasy figures who lack mothers and might best be described as the daughters of men (i.e., born of the pornographic imagination and styled according to male desires, values, and ideas; Eve, Aphrodite, Galatea, Maria ... et al). 

 

Another theme that Byström's work in the exhibition touches on is the question of why human beings have always dreamed of creating perfect copies of themselves whilst, at the same time, they possess a deep-rooted fear - automatonophobia - of replicants; be they dolls, cyborgs, or clones.     

      

Perhaps that's why, in the end, she seems to get such relief from having ripped off the head of poor Harmony ...

 

 

 

Arvida Byström:  

A Daughter Without a Mother (2022)

Notes

 

[a] Qualeasha Wood: It's All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024): woven jacquard, glass seed beads, and machine embroidery. The exhibition label informs us: 

      "Using webcam self-portraits, the artist reclaims visibility, challenging systems of control while highlighting the tension between self-expression and the pervasive influence of socia media and digital technologies." 

 

[b] Arvida Bystrom: A Daughter Without a Mother (2022): mixed media installation, including a short film (36 secs). The exhibition label informs us:  

      "Originally conceived as a performance piece [...] the work critically examines how AI is used to replicate beauty standards, perpetuating the sexualisation of the female body and contributing to its objectification."

 

[c] Matthilde Friis, 'From the Selfie to the Avatar: Beauty, Bias, and the Digital Self' (2025). This essay written to accompany the Virtual Beauty exhibition is available on the Someret House website: click here.   

 

[d] See Jean Baudrillard's Forget Foucault, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Semiotext(e), 2007).

      In 1976, Baudrillard sent an essay with the title Oublier Foucault to the magazine Critique (where the latter worked as an editor). Published the following year, it made Baudrillard a notorious figure within philosophical figures; for not only did he pretty much sum up Foucault's work (on power and sexuality) as a mythic discourse, but he also ridiculed the revolutionary politics of desire being peddled at that time by Deleuze and Guattari.  

       Forget Foucault ecourages readers to move beyond Foucault's cratology, rather than become trapped by its logic and thus prevented from thinking the complex dynamics of contemporary culture in a manner more appropriate to the times.      

 

[e-h] Matthilde Friis, as cited and linked to in note [c] above. 

 

[i] Just for the record, I've been thinking through questions to do with racial fetishism, sexual objectification, the visual representation of female bodies, etc., since 1991: my MA dissertation was on the position and portrayal of women in Nazi Art and Society; my initial PhD proposal was on the figure of the prostitute and the construction of illicit female sexual identity; and there are many posts published on Torpedo the Ark dealing with these and related topics from a perspective informed by my reading of feminist and queer theory (go to labels and find them for yourself).    

 

[j] For my discussion of glitch aesthetics, see the post entitled 'Glitch: the Art of Error and Imperfection' (28 June 2023): click here.  

 

[k] I'm sure I don't need to remind readers that this phrase - 'the medium is the message' - was coined by the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan to suggest that how the message is relayed matters more than the actual content; it's the medium - such as TV or the internet - that ultimately shapes our understanding of the world and ourselves, and how we interact with others, etc.

      See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (1964). The phrase 'the medium is the message' is found in chapter one and suplies the chapter title.    

 

[l] The press release was for an exhibition featuring Byström's work entitled Abyss (26 June - 26 July 2025) at Galerie Kandlhofer (Vienna, Austria): click here.  

 

[m] Quoted from the Virtual Beauty exhibition label describing Arvida Byström's: A Daughter Without a Mother (2022).  

 

Are We the Gods of Our Own Image? Notes on the Virtual Beauty Exhibition (Somerset House 2025): Part 1 (Sections I-IV)

 

 

Top: Ines Alpha: I'd rather be a cyborg (2024) 

Bottom: M.C. Abbott,  María Buey González, and Carl Olsson: Peak Face (2021)    

Images from the Virtual Beauty exhibition 

somersethouse.org.uk

 

'This exhibition highlights how questions of beauty are intrinsically linked to the screens and devices 

through which we view ourselves every day, and the altered, enhanced, 

or filtered identities we share via these devices.' 

 

 

I. 

 

Currently showing at Somerset House is a new exhibition curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado [a], Matthilde Friis [b], and Bunny Kinney [c]. 

 

Entitled Virtual Beauty and featuring work by over twenty artists working across sculpture, photography, installation, and video, it explores the impact of digital culture and technologies on traditional notions of beauty; in other words whereof aesthetics in an age of social media, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence [d]. 

 

Well, I say that, but it seems to me that most of the works are really more concerned with sexuality and subjectivity, self-image and identity, rather than with beauty per se (which is fair enough, I suppose, as it's virtually impossible to discuss the latter without also discussing these other topics). 

 

 

II. 

 

According to the press statement, a highlight of the show is a work entitled Omniprésence (1993) by the French multi-media artist ORLAN who has been interrogating ideas of beauty and how the body is stylised since before many of the other participants in the exhibition were even born; and perhaps no one has taken things as far as her. 

 

However, in an age when plastic surgery is now common and there are several reality TV programmes happy to portray in graphic detail what such cosmetic procedures involve (and how they can sometimes have very undesirable conequences), watching a 21 minute film of the above under the knife over thirty years ago is a bit boring after a couple of minutes. 

 

It's an ironic consequence of living in a world which artists such as ORLAN anticipated by pushing the boundaries between art and technology and questioning not only what it is to be beautiful but human, that their work - groundbreaking and transgressive at the time - now seems naive and passé.  

 

This, of course, is also an unfortunate consequence of getting old; one has seen and heard and read so much already about the urgent questions that this exhibition addresses.  

 

However, as I don't want to be negative or sound like a grumpy old man who thinks he knows it all, perhaps it's best if I constrain my remarks to the works that did excite my interest and make smile; works to do with cyborgs, sex dolls, representations of the black female body, and the philosophical question of faciality (i.e., several of my longtime obsessions).  

 

 

III. 

 

Firstly, I'd like to discuss a narrated video made as part of a collaborative research project entitled Peak Face (2021), by M. C. Abbott, María Buey González and Carl Olssen, which pondered whether we're entering a post-facial era where sapience is no longer tied to a thing that overcodes and organises not only the front of the human head, but the entire body - the entire planet! - if given the chance to do so [e].  

 

As a Deleuzian, I've long been fascinated by that very special mechanism known as the face. And the politics of faciality [f] - or enfacialisation as I think the evolutionary biologists like to say - continues to intrigue.

 

For it's a fascinating question, is it not, to ask what happens (and what comes next) if you uncouple sapience (i.e., the form of social intelligence that is definitional of modern humanity) from faces; will a posthuman future know nothing of physiognomy, or will artificially intelligent entities develop faces of their very own?   

 

In other words, could it be that faces are indispensable and that even cyborgs will remain trapped in the facial age; "or is our facialised world simply an accident of evolution" [3] [g], rather than the universal fate awaiting man, beast, and machine alike?   

 

In as much as art should challenge us to rethink ideas and reimagine the possibilities of self, then Peak Face is, arguably, the standout work of the exhibition. For it powerfully reminds viewers that whilst "it is indubitable that the face has proven to be an incredibly resilient platform in a variety of ecological contexts and has been a constant throughout a wide arc of speciation" [5], there is "no positive reason to believe that having a face is optimally adaptive on Earth in an absolute sense - and even if it was in the past, that would be no guarantee that it is now" [5].

 

Of course, given the ubiquitous character of the face, it may seem losing it or "even imagining an end to faciality is an impossibe exercise" [12]. And yet, says Olsson, peak face may be just around the corner; i.e., there may be a point "beyond which both self-representation and cephalisation decline as social processes discover alternative platforms" [13]. 

 

That doesn't necessarily spell the end of the face, but it would mark a major upheaval: after peak face, everything changes. And the irony is that "such a turning point may occur through the deployment of the very technologies that have driven the proliferation of selfies and other forms of facial representation" [13]. 

 

Olsson concludes: 

 

"The defacement of the world may be a chance to save ourselves from the constraints of the facial platform. Soon we might be able to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, earnestly, 'Do we really need this?'" [16]

 

 

IV.

 

And speaking of mirrors ... 

 

Probably the most fun exhibit - certainly for narcissists like me - was Ines Alpha's magic mirror which gives everyone the opportunity to become-cyborg (see image below) and experience the possibilities afforded by new technologies in constructing posthuman identities that are not tied to the constraints of biological reality and societal expectation.

 

If Alpha's virtual 3D makeup isnt quite as liberating (or as empowering) as she likes to believe and doesn't enable us to lose the face, at least it allows us to mask and mutate the latter in superficial ways and, importantly, her dreamlike vision of beauty isn't corrective or all about an ideal of perfection; "it’s speculative and full of opportunities for reinvention" [h]. 

 

It's a shame Virtual Beauty has been declared as not suitable for visitors under 15 years of age [i], as I think that this age group would not only have the most to learn, but probably have the most fun too - particularly with Alpha's mixed media installation.       

 

Selfie taken on 14 August 2025 with my i-Phone in Ines Alpha's magic mirror 

which formed part of her work entitled I'd rather be a cyborg (2024)  

 

Notes

 

[a] Gonzalo Herrero Delicado is a London-based independent curator, educator, editor, and architect concerned with the impact of climate change and digital technologies on the world and artistic practice.

 

[b] Matthilde Friis is a visual anthropologist and PhD candidate at Northumbria University. Her research and work explore issues around sexuality, feminism and gender. She curated the exhibition Working Girls! at Gallery 46 (London, E1), in 2024, which had obvious appeal for illicit lovers (and lovers of the illicit) everywhere.

 

[c] Bunny Kinney is a British-Canadian filmmaker, creative director, and consultant, who knows how to cast a critical theoretical eye on issues within contemporary culture such as youth identity, gender and sexality. He co-curated Charles Jeffrey: The Lore of Loverboy exhibition at Somerset House in 2024, which I discussed in a post published on 9 August 2024: click here. 

 

[d] For full details about the exhibition, which runs from 23 July until 28 September, at Somerset House, Strand, London WC2, visit the Somerset House website: click here. And to watch a short promotional film on YouTube featuring three of the artists discussed in this post (and from where I borrowed the title), click here. 

 

[e] The project was developed at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, as part of a three-year research and design initiative, The Terraforming (2020-22), directed by Benjamin H. Bratton and Nicolay Boyadjiev. Readers are encouraged to read Olsson's essay 'Peak Face' (2023) which is available on the Urbanomic website and can be downloaded as a pdf: click here. And to watch the Peak Face video on YouTube: click here. 

      It sounds a bit dramatic to say the face organises the entire body, but as Olsson writes: 

      "From their humble origins as mere front-ends, faces developed into composites [which ...] played an important role in organising and constraining the physiology of many animals, and [...] they have played this role continuously for a very, very long time. Nothing, it seems, escapes the face." [4]

      Some readers, loyal to the face, might be quick to ask So what? and point to the many evolutionary advantages faces bring, but as Olsson also reminds us, "while faces have undoubtedly enabled a new level of behavioural complexity and flexibility, they may also have imposed limitations on the acquisition of future traits" [4].

      As for the face organising the entire planet ... Olsson argues, rightly, I think, that the built environment "has not just been shaped to 'fit' the face but has been constructed in its image" [10] in an act of planetary-scale narcissism. 

 

[f] See, for example, the post on Torpedo the Ark published on 13 September 2013 - click here - in which I discuss the politics of the face. And for a much more recent post on probe-heads [têtes chercheuses] in relation to the sculptural work of Daniel Silver (published 18 December 2024), click here.

 

[g] Carl Olsson, 'Peak Face' - essay linked to in note [e]. Note that all following page numbers given in the post - and in note [e] - refer to the pdf that can be downloaded from the Urbanomic website.

 

[h] Matthilde Friis, Virtual Beauty exhibition essay - 'From the Selfie to the Avatar: Beauty, Bias, and the Digital Self' - available on the Somerset House website: click here.

 

[i] To be honest, I'm not sure if declaring an exhibition as unsuitable for under 15s prohibits them from entering or if it is merely a required notification. What if, for example, they are accompanied by an adult? I do seem to recall that when I was at the exhibition a woman entered with a child in a pushchair, but perhaps they were deeemed too young to be upset or corrupted by the art on display.        

 

Part two of this post (sections V - VIII) can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

On Loverboy and the Politics of Queerness

LOVERBOY

 

 

I. 

 

Just a brief note of congratulations to Charles Jeffrey and his Loverboy label for notching up ten years in the world of fashion; a decade of "tartan, trash, animalism, anarchy, paganism and punk" as one appreciative critic wrote in a Guardian piece celebrating Jeffrey's achievement [1]. 

 

If almost inevitably one comes away from 'The Lore of LOVERBOY' exhibition at Somerset House [2] feeling that one's seen much of it before having grown up in the world of Westwood, Galliano, and McQueen, nevertheless one also comes away wishing that one was forty years younger and able to enter into Jeffrey's world unburdened by memory of the above.

 

And, to be fair, his aesthetic sensibility isn't simply a pale imitation of anyone else's; Jeffrey's designs do have something unique about them, even if they unfold within a certain tradition and fashion history. And I'm always going to love clothes that make smile like the outfits shown above ...  

 

 

II. 

 

However, if I were to be critical, then perhaps Jeffrey's work is just a little too much at times; too theatrical, too playful, too romantic, too rooted in a hedonistic club scene ...

 

For better or for worse, I belong to a generation that would rather see the word HATE than HOPE sloganised on a jumper and my politics do not exclusively revolve around questions of gender and sexuality.  

 

And as for the increasingly tired and tiresome concept of queerness - one which Jeffrey repeatedly refers us to - I'm almost tempted to echo what one (queer) writer says here: "Queerness does not ensure that we are more compassionate, more loving, or more fair, or that we are kinder, stronger, realer people." [3] 

 

That is to say, queerness doesn't make virtuous or morally superior - nor even more interesting, alas, when it has merely become another identity and commercial selling point. 

                 

 

Notes

 

[1] Ellie Violet Bramley, 'An absolute joy: 10 years of Charles Jeffrey's playful Loverboy', The Guardian (9 June 2024): click here.  

[2] For details of The Lore of LOVERBOY exhibition at Somerset House, click here. Thanks to Ian Trowell for bringing this retrospective to my attention. 

[3] See Queer is Boring, 'Why Queer is Boring: An Introduction' (21 Feb 2014), on medium.com: click here. 

Synthetic Aesthetics: Notes on the Genius of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Illustration of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg from Dezeen 

the online architecture, interiors, and design magazine

dezeen.com

Is Daisy Ginsberg the most interesting artist working in the world today? She's certainly a strong contender for the title and would probably get my vote.

For the past decade she has explored and experimented with the possibilities of synthetic biology, creating works and curating exhibitions that critically examine the relationship between art, science and nature, whilst researching the human desire to enhance the world (her Ph.D. completed in 2017 was on how our dream of a better, brighter future materially shapes the present).

Curently resident at Somerset House Studios, Ginsberg's recent projects have included one on the possibility of wilding Mars for the benefit of new plant species (rather than terraforming it to the advantage of man); one on recreating the scent of extinct flowers from remnants of their DNA (whilst simutaneously resurrecting a notion of the sublime); and - opening at the end of this month - an installation entitled Machine Auguries that highlights the silencing of the natural world via the use of deepfake birdsong to create a synthetic dawn chorus.

Working with the sound designer Chris Timpson, Ginsberg has combined recordings of real birds with machine generated responses - the latter only being distinguishable from the former due to a deliberately inbuilt distortion. It's both a very beautiful and heartbreakingly depressing work that raises awareness of the fact that we have lost 40 million birds in the UK in just 50 years and that many once-familiar and much-loved species continue to be in decline.

There's no doubting that artificially intelligent machines can generate many fantastic images and sounds - things that are more real than real -  but, personally, I would hate to live in a virtual world without actual flowers, birdsong, or the sound of children playing.   

Notes

'Machine Auguries', by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, is part of the exhibition 24/7: A Wake-Up Call for Our Non-Stop World, at the Embankment Galleries, Somerset House, London, 31 October 2019 - 23 February 2020. Click here for more details.

Readers interested in knowing more about Ginsberg and her astonishing body of work, should visit her website: daisyginsberg.com