VIRTUAL BEAUTY

A NEW SHOW AT SOMERSET HOUSE DISSECTS MODERN TECHNOLOGY’S IMPACT ON WHAT WE CONSIDER BEAUTIFUL.

By Zoe Whitfield

It began with a cell phone. The arrival of the Samsung SGH-V200 in 2003 can, at least partially, be labeled the genesis of a culture shaped by its relationship with technology, and the subsequent marriage between identity and the digital world. As one of the first commercial devices to feature a built-in camera capable of rotating—and hence producing a frontal picture, or self-portrait—the phone was an early tool of the practices that have come to define what contemporary beauty looks like and the ways we understand it.

At Somerset House in London, where Virtual Beauty recently opened, the Samsung model is appropriately displayed in a glass case. Nearby, a series of famous selfies loop on an iPhone: Ellen DeGeneres’s cursed group shot at the 2014 Oscars, Emily Ratajkowski and Kim Kardashian giving the mirror the middle finger in 2016, Barack Obama posing with David Cameron and Helle Thorning-Schmidt at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in 2013, and the first selfie by the late Pope Francis, with a group of teenagers, that same year. Collectively, these images highlight the core role selfies have assumed across all areas of modern living in the past decade.

“We’re living in an age where we’re more self-aware than ever, and that’s entirely because of the advent of social media,” offers Bunny Kinney, a filmmaker, creative director and consultant, who curated the exhibition with Gonzalo Herrero Delicado and the visual anthropologist Mathilde Friis. “We wanted to include different elements that speak to the anchor points that have changed culture and impacted the development of this topic, pushing the more anthropological [story] of how we’ve arrived at this point—where this is how we’re expressing ourselves, and this is how we might express ourselves in the future.”

Initially presented at Switzerland’s House of Electronic Arts (HEK) during Art Basel last year, Virtual Beauty examines the impact of current and incoming digital technologies, featuring works from 20 artists. Directly or adjacently, each considers notions of beauty and the way AI, social media, and biometrics are reconfiguring what constitutes the beautiful—or even some kind of ‘normal’—in the realm of appearance. How aesthetics informed by an algorithm challenge our comprehension of gender, sexuality, race, and identity, and where the power then lies, are questions that additionally get unpacked through mediums including photography, video, installation, and sculpture.

“When I was younger, being interested in beauty was specific to products and makeup in a way that felt very vanilla. There wasn’t discourse around it that reached mainstream awareness beyond classic beauty ideals,” continues Kinney, who co-launched Dazed Beauty in 2018 with makeup artist and creative director, Isamaya Ffrench. (Virtual Beauty was largely built on the ideas they explored back then; a few issue covers, amongst them a warped Kylie Jenner portrait, appear in a vitrine in London.) “Now, there’s this kind of explosion: People are interested in beauty in the way you can be into fashion. There’s different challenger brands, content creators, and makeup artists pushing the boundaries of what beauty looks and feels like.”

In Qualeasha Wood’s It’s All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024), the cell phone reappears, this time as a prop. The Philadelphia-based artist, whose practice is concerned with recontextualizing the figure of the Black Femme, works primarily with motifs common in the broader digital landscape: URLs, status icons, cursors. Filling large jacquard tapestries with these modern symbols, her likeness at the center, she surrounds herself often with a ring light that reads as a halo, drawing parallels with religious iconography. In Excellences & Perfections, Amalia Ulman’s 2014 catfishing-as-performance piece, the artist leans into the act we all become complicit in when sharing anything, though chiefly our most glossy selves, on social media. For five months, her Instagram account became a vehicle for enacting influencer stereotypes; on the wall at Somerset House, she poses in what appears to be a hotel bathroom, the words ‘Pretty Please’ adorning an otherwise simple white tee.

While apps and filters have heightened—and in many ways, streamlined—how we reinvent our physical selves for different audiences, the beauty world has long been a space that accommodates extremes: Omniprésence was French artist ORLAN’s seventh medical performance, part of a series of plastic surgeries she undertook in the early 1990s to challenge normative ideals of beauty. Many were broadcast to galleries and museums. “I study social phenomena,” asserts the artist today, in a short documentary that accompanies the exhibition online. “Every time I use a technology, there is a fundamental deep reason—and it is always a questioning, a query.”

In 1985, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” sought to recast the cyborg as a feminist possibility, interrogating established interpretations of feminism and highlighting how we might expand notions of identity, beyond simply human. The essay, first published in the Socialist Review, now lends itself to 3D artist Ines Alpha’s work—which she describes as digital software makeup and which takes on the appearance of metallic tentacles flowing from the face. “Technology gave me a tool that enabled me to have power and control over versions of myself,” explains Alpha, whose I’d rather be a cyborg borrows its moniker from Haraway. “Using those technologies was very liberating.”

Despite the sense of play many artists have found in these tools, new anxieties have emerged in tandem with their proliferation. Contemporary standards like ‘Instagram face’ (characterized by catlike eyes and high cheekbones, a small nose, and full lips) are now commonplace both IRL and online. The writer and editor Jia Tolentino has written a deep dive on this phenomenon, published in the New Yorker in 2019, meeting with plastic surgeons and surveying social media to document the work celebrities gravitate towards and thus render aspirational. “I had the sense that I was living in some inexorable future,” she mused, noting the subsequent effect the research had on her own relationship with the mirror.

On TikTok, where realistic-seeming filters (that are oftentimes wildly unrealistic) are employed almost universally, idolized by users of all ages, new restrictions for under-18s were introduced at the end of 2024: The platform prevented them from engaging with filters that explicitly modify features in ways makeup cannot, such as ‘Bold Glamour,’ which launched in 2023. Providing the appearance of smooth skin and other glow-up-affiliated (plastic surgery-coded) features, the filter was viewed more than 400 million times in its first month alone, and its popularity has made it a stand-in for the filter discourse that has since transpired.

Another bleak truth that runs concurrently with the widespread adoption of AI is its racial bias, something interdisciplinary artist Minne Atairu addresses in her practice. With Blonde Braids Study II (2023) for example, she looked at AI generators like Midjourney and perceived its distortions of Black identity; skin was generally lightened and women were depicted with chemically straightened hair. Mirroring the sort of discrimination Black women are made privy to in real life, the work challenges the training data that such software uses, underscoring how AI amplifies these pre-existing inequalities. In March she introduced Da Braidr, a free online generator with its own bias toward box braids and cornrows, which she hopes people might share with their real life stylists.

“The tools are readily available, and in the last year the AI conversation has totally saturated the mainstream,” observes Kinney, reflecting on where we find ourselves today, far beyond the unedited selfie. “Beauty is no longer makeup to look hot or [products to] de-age yourself. These are mediums for self-expression—people are interested in responding, challenging, and disrupting, which is enabled by the rise of technology.” Virtual Beauty then, in many ways proposes a landscape wherein beauty is so interwoven with technology as to exist almost exclusively on a screen—coincidentally where, despite its physical presence, the exhibition itself is likely to be most viewed.

Presented in an art context, with some distance and perspective from aesthetically-inclined users, the works on show encourage us to reconsider the parameters and construction of identity in virtual spaces, while questions of where this might lead, what the role of (and power held by) programmers is, and to what extent this could reshape the beauty counter, linger. “It’s a huge industry, and it’s grown exponentially,” notes Kinney. “That power it has, as a capitalist enterprise, naturally creates discourse. It also naturally leans towards the dystopian, but asking what the creative possibilities are that feel exciting... That is the major concern for me.”