Mia Faithfull

Social media’s algorithms work by galvanising individuals to perform synthetic behaviours and physiognomies. In the painting Lips, a mechanical eye elucidates the didactic relationship between an organic and non-organic algorithm. The technological algorithm is trying to pin down and reconstruct the facial features of the subject, while the human subject is performing for the application. 

The Empty digital work was inspired by voice notes sent by female friends in which one says ‘I just feel completely empty’. This piece highlights social media as a visual performance for women, removed from their emotional selves. The juxtaposition of how social media has made women feel against how it has made them look. 

Posing in lingerie is a trend identifiable within the visual lexicon of the Hot Babe’s instagram account. The women aren’t on a set or a magazine shoot, but in their own homes. While studying these accounts, a phenomenon emerged in which hundreds of women have the same bedroom; constituting a muted pastel tonal palette, mirrored bedside tables and vanity units, buttoned upholstered velvet bed frames, and extremely fluffy fabrics.

These platforms facilitate the process of self valorisation in an effort to gain both social and financial capital. The young female user isn’t concerned in finding pleasure for herself, but pleasing this society and delivering its standards of beauty and taste.

Writer Rob Horning contended that ‘selfies are a way to explicitly conflate ourselves with objects to be manipulated.’ Snapchat’s filter technology merges the cute visage with commodity toy visuals.

The cutest toys have faces and often overly large eyes, pervasively liberalizing the gaze Benjamin associates with the aura of autonomous art, other facial features - mouths in particular - tend to be simplified to the point of being barely there…cuteness seems to amount to denying speech. A fuller personification becomes impossible because it would symbolically render that object our equal, erasing the power differential on which the aesthetic depends.

-Sianna Ngai (Our New Aesthetic Categories) 

Simone De Beauviour highlighted the interruption of commodity culture on the young girl’s biological and cognitive journey. While (and in Walter Benjamin’s narrative) the boy plays with toy trucks and trains, the young girl is encouraged to play with a doll. It is a passive thing that she will dress and admire, and its appearance will become a trope for the self. Presenting a toy doll to the girl is effectively placing in her hand an object that makes tangible her visuality.  

Barbie is a trope which adult women pay homage to online (pop star Nicki Minaj’s Instagram title is simply ‘Barbie’), being an idealised delineation of beauty merged with a commodity toy.

The methodology involves layering snapchat filters over a toy doll’s face. Cut outs of Kylie Jenner’s Lips appear both yoni and as the identifiable floating Snapchat hearts. Snapchat’s market value dropped 1.3billion dollars the day Kylie Jenner announced she no longer used the application. 

A sculpture based on the classic Fisher-Price ‘stacking toy’, replicating the gesture of touch, play and discovery. It engenders discomfort and therefore suggest an aversion that should already be felt when conflating the infantile, commodified and sexual.