The Body As A Site
As visual culture expands with mass adaptations of social media and the virtual world promoted by algorithms dictating certain aesthetics over others, it has developed a phenomenon where the body has outgrown it’s original biological utility. Users create stark iterations of their reality, one that aims to conform and further perpetuate the ideal standards created by the images we are continuously exposed to online. Infinite ‘how to’ videos are uploaded every second—tutorials that teach us how to contour the face, grow our glutes, or trim the waist—all in an effort to pressure viewers to progress their form into what the algorithms considers ideal.
The consequences ripple into reality, creating a feedback loop, as individuals trying to conform into the ideal avatar, resort to one of four methods: surgically enhancing certain desirable body parts, such as breasts or cheekbones, artificially expanding the muscles through exercise and steroids, declining the form through starvation, or other binding techniques such as waist training or chest binding.
The project: Body As A Site: proposes alternative forms individuals can inhabit by exploring these parameters of extension and restriction. Instrumentalizing forms that are so predominant in the online media we all consume, and using those precedences to then subvert the form the collective imagination considers ideal. The proposal is a tutorial teaching the viewer how to construct a structural wearable filter for the form, one that defies stereotypes of existing body structures and further questions the biological and physical limitations of the human body.
