In a new exhibition, the question arises: Have the digital beauty standards of Snapchat and looksmaxing caused us to overlook genuine beauty and reality?
Virtual Beauty: A Journey Through the Digital Landscape of Aesthetics
The "Virtual Beauty" exhibition at Somerset House, running from 23 July to 28 September 2025, delves into the fascinating world of digital culture, artificial intelligence (AI), social media, and avatar identity, and their profound impact on contemporary beauty standards and concepts of identity.
The exhibition, co-curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Mathilde Friis, and Bunny Kinney, features over 20 international artists working across photography, video, installations, sculpture, and more, to examine how aesthetics today are increasingly algorithmically engineered and curated.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a critique of the algorithm-driven homogeneity of beauty ideals, highlighting phenomena such as "Instagram face" and "Snapchat dysmorphia," where digitally distorted ideals drive real-world conformity pressures, sometimes influencing cosmetic surgery choices. The exhibition questions who defines beauty in the digital age and how digital technologies influence how people perceive themselves and others.
Historically, it includes landmark works like ORLAN’s 1993 live-streamed facial surgery performance, which prefigured today’s performative beauty rituals and data-driven visibility, connecting past critiques to the present digital landscape. The show also comments on the evolution from early selfies to current issues like deepfake pornography, AI sex dolls, and CGI influencers, situating beauty within the "Post-Internet" art movement that examines the internet's impact on culture and aesthetics.
One part of the exhibition envisions futuristic technological interventions on beauty, such as a satirical video imagining brain implants that allow users to alter their appearance digitally, similar to live TikTok filters in real life. Another section reflects on virtual worlds where alternate identities and avatars are fashioned through 3D scanning and modeling in digital spaces, transforming perceptions of self and beauty.
The exhibition is divided into three sections, with the first covering the early stages of digital self-representation, including the use of a silver Samsung flip phone from 2003. Ben Cullen Williams' three-channel film Past Life (2021) explores distorted, altered faces beyond traditional beauty standards, generated by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).
Meanwhile, Qualeasha Wood's embroidered tapestry, It's All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024), questions the misrepresentation and erasure of the Black femme body in digital spaces. Arvida Byström's installation A Daughter Without a Mother (2022) features a female sex doll equipped with AI speech-generation software, encouraging viewers to reflect on the complexities of identity and intimacy linked to human-shaped mechanisms.
Dr. Cliff Lauson, Director of Exhibitions at Somerset House, states that the exhibition is an exploration about how digital culture and technology affect us in everyday life. The works delve into dystopian themes, nostalgia, and the surreal, shifting between past, present, and future.
The exhibition, Virtual Beauty, completes a circuit between the virtual and the real world, leaving viewers wondering if in the relentless pursuit of beauty, we are more vulnerable online than ever before. It's a thought-provoking journey that invites visitors to reconsider traditional definitions of beauty in light of digital, AI-driven influences.
Don't miss out on this immersive and critical investigation into the entanglement of technology, identity, and aesthetics. Visit Somerset House to experience "Virtual Beauty" before it closes on 28 September.
The exhibition, "Virtual Beauty," highlights the interplay between fashion-and-beauty and technology in the digital age, showcasing international artists' works that question how algorithmically engineered aesthetics impact contemporary beauty standards and self-perception. Future technological interventions on beauty, such as brain implants for digital appearance alteration, are envisioned in this thought-provoking exhibition, making a bold statement about lifestyle in the era of AI and social media.
