Digital Self And Assorted Personal Items
Year of Creation:
2025
Media:
Custom Software, Real-Time Video Processing, Display
Dimensions:
Variable
Interaction Type:
Not Interactive
Duration:
Looping / Real-Time
Description:
Images of the artist’s face and body are digitally warped into undulating 3D forms that resemble alien planets. These shapes rotate, overlap, and occlude one another in a mesmerizing cycle, transforming the human form into something both beautiful and estranged. Beneath the animation, red text scrolls like an error message, as if a program had failed to execute and raised an exception: raise BodyShapeNotAccepted(“Incorrect Body Shape”). The work inhabits the intersection of vulnerability and alienation—longing for connection, negotiating body image in a digital culture, and questioning the boundary between human and machine. By using his own body as source material, the artist foregrounds empathy and personal risk, embedding intimacy in the technological distortion.
Core Question:
What does it mean when our bodies are treated as errors within digital and social systems?
Loop Analysis
Structure:
Representation Loop
Definition:
A system where the body becomes digital material, reshaped and re-encountered as other-than-human.
Leverage Point:
Recognition that digital mediation can both alienate and expose deep vulnerability.
Inputs / Outputs:
Facial and bodily image → real-time distortion into planetary 3D shapes → viewer perception of alien body → empathetic or estranged response
Effect:
Oscillation between beauty and discomfort; confrontation with body image, identity, and digital mediation
Ethical Valence:
Vulnerable and critical—exposes how systems of representation can wound while also inviting empathy
Design Note:
The use of the artist’s own body resists abstraction; the vulnerability personalizes the critique and destabilizes the distance between viewer and system.
