Virtual Beauty | Somerset House

‘Instagram face’, CGI influencers and AI sex dolls are all going under the microscope in the new Somerset House exhibition, Virtual Beauty.  

Through more than 20 works, this pay-what-you-feel show explores the impact of digital technologies on how we define beauty today. The exhibition traces the origin of the digital selfie from the first flip phone with a front-facing camera, to today’s minefield of deepfake pornography, augmented reality face filters and Instagram algorithms. It’s primarily concerned with the ‘Post-Internet’ art movement, a 21st-century body of work and criticism that examines the influence of the internet on art and culture.

In the first room, we encounter early artworks that comment on society’s gruelling beauty standards, like ORLAN’s disturbing 1993 performance that saw her going under the knife live on camera, and taking recommendations by audience members over the phone. Famous celeb selfies like Ellen DeGeneres’ A-lister packed Oscars snap are shown on a grainy phone screen, then we’re taken on a whistlestop tour of digital artworks, each one providing some sort of comment on beauty, society and the online world.  

There’s a lot in Virtual Beauty that is pretty on the nose. We are shown a Black Mirror-style satirical advert for a pharmaceutical company called ‘You’, that offers people the chance to alter their appearance without plastic surgery – simply have a chip inserted into your brain, and the technology makes you appear different, essentially like an IRL TikTok filter. It’s amusing to watch, but not particularly original.

fans of Black Mirror will be entertained by this unsettling and sometimes beautiful exhibition

In the same room is a 3D-printed handbag resembling a womb; a deep reddish-pink sack with snaking silver veins crawling across it. Accompanying the bag is a video of a faux fashion advert – a comment on how technology might one day allow prospective parents to make ‘designer’ babies, selecting their hair colour, eye colour and the like. Again, you’d think that an artwork about designer babies could have taken the word ‘designer’ a bit less literally. 

There is good stuff in here too, though. One of the best pieces is a work by 3D makeup artist Ines Alpha. We see a video of her face, she looks like a geisha from the future, pale-skinned with bright pink cheeks, eyelashes, eyebrows and a smattering of beauty spots. An alien-like mask begins to emerge, with pink and silver tentacles snaking around her eyes, forehead and cheeks. Next to the video is the 3D-printed real mask, and then there’s an augmented reality (AR) video where I get to try this wacky-but-beautiful thing on virtually. That this is the only interactive element of the exhibit seems to be a missed trick – for a show entirely focussed on the digital age, I wish there had been more opportunities to get involved with the tech myself. 

Virtual Beauty also looks to the future with the beguiling ‘Virtual Embalming’, a 2018 video by Frederik Heyman that considers how people want to be remembered after their death. The piece imagines its subjects in a virtual shrine, surrounded by paraphernalia they want to sum up their life. It’s haunting and beautiful – model and musician Kim Peers is suspended in bondage ropes over a bed in a decaying ‘abandoned Asian hotel room’, while fashion designer Michèle Lamy stands on a sandy plinth in the Gobi desert, lions at her feet. 

Many topics are touched on, but not fully delved into. At once, Virtual Beauty tells us that cosmetic surgery is bad, that we are slaves to the algorithm, everyone is just one AI-augmented selfie away from becoming a bodily dysmorphic wannabe cyborg. But it also suggests that technology can free us by allowing us to take control of our digital image. There are lots of complex ideas at play: verbose gallery text tells me that we are in a post-internet, post-facial and post-physical age. One artwork highlights how AI tools have a racial bias, another reclaims technology used in deepfake pornography to make a gender-defying portrait of a woman with a bodybuilder’s physique in skimpy black lingerie. There’s a lot going on, but I don’t feel a strong point of view coming through. 

Sure, fans of Black Mirror will be entertained by this unsettling and sometimes beautiful exhibition. But I’m still left wondering what the whole thing is trying to say.