If you open your Instagram feed right now, what would your followers be able to discern about you, your personal style and your taste? Do you give more 'clean girl' or 'soft girl' vibes? Are you more into 'ballerina core' or an 'old money' aesthetic? Do you have an Instagram face? Have you ever considered a facelift? In the pervasive digital culture that assaults us every day, it's difficult to escape from the constant stream of TikTok trends, curated monthly content dumps by influencers and the incessant ads offering the most desirable, innovative or unique thing that can transform one's life completely – tailored just for you. Digital media and trends that seem immaterial leak perceptively into the physical lives we lead, influencing the choices we make. This tension between the surreality of self-representation online and its manifestation in our material lives underpins the curatorial thesis for Virtual Beauty, conceptualised by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Mathilde Friis and Bunny Kinney in 2019; currently on view at Somerset House as part of the institute's 25th anniversary programme. As Delicado notes in conversation with STIR, the project came about from his interest in the impact of technology on our lives and a collaboration with Kinney, the editor-in-chief of Dazed Beauty.

"Around 2019, we very clearly started noticing the impact of social media on teenagers and younger generations," he explains. Tracing the innovations from this point in time that have since mired society more firmly into the virtual realm, he notes the pervasive impact of COVID, the rise of gaming and online streaming cultures and, more recently, the role of artificial intelligence in blurring distinctions between the virtual and real. Elaborating on beauty in the digital sphere as the show's focus, Friis adds, "For us, beauty was always something that goes deeper than the skin. It has more to do with how we represent ourselves, especially in the digital environment." A range of international and contemporary artists working across sculpture, photography, installation and video will display their work at Virtual Beauty, including Somerset House Studios resident artist Sin Wai Kin.

While there are some works in the show that were created almost a decade (or more) ago, the issues that they highlight—oppressive beauty standards, our tendencies of self-curation, proliferation of aesthetics that dictate consumerist practices—remain relevant. The earliest work on display, French multimedia artist ORLAN's performance art piece, Omniprésence (1993), is a video of the artist live-recording one of her plastic surgery procedures. Known for using her own body as a canvas and transforming herself into female figures from classical art through surgery, ORLAN broadcast the seventh procedure in this process live to fifteen galleries internationally. While the complete work, comprising nine cosmetic procedures, dubbed The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, offers a critique of how classicism viewed the female body, the livestream feels particularly contemporary. More recently, in Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee's portrait, Altering Facial Features with WH5 (2016), facial features are distorted with the use of a special helmet that incorporates optical instruments. How we determine what facial features are acceptable or desirable—'Kylie Jenner lips', double eyelids or 'Asian eyes'—has always been a point of debate, and even a point of discrimination towards certain communities.

While conventional notions of beauty continue to uphold specific Eurocentric ideals (with even Black features only being deemed acceptable when someone like the Kardashians uses them), this phenomenon only becomes exacerbated in an increasingly online world, as these artists highlight. On view at the exhibition will also be portraits of Lil Miquela, a virtual avatar and now a viral influencer, and photographs taken by Amalia Ulman for her scripted performance Excellences & Perfections. While Miquela’s popularity among the ‘it’ crowd confirms that digital media has always offered only a veneer of authenticity for its artificially constructed reality, in 2014, the period during which Ulman staged her critique of social media, this was not as evident.

The Somerset House exhibition is an updated version of a 2024 showcase presented at the House of Electronic Arts, Basel. As the curators note, artists and themes that reflect the particular context of London were incorporated for a topical look at a contentious and complex topic. "We are living in a much more hybrid world than ever before. So it becomes very important to understand that beauty and the digital [can also be] a way of empowering everyone. [There] doesn't need to be a canon of beauty, as it has been defined in the past, but it can be more plastic and more adaptable to the eye of the beholder," he states.

The notion of empowerment is explored by artists who use the possibilities of digital space to control and offer a different way of seeing. For instance, interdisciplinary artist Minne Atairu's Blonde Braids Study II is a critique of generative AI and its inherent racial bias. When given a prompt, the digital technology could not generate images of Black women with blond hair, so Atairu created her own algorithm and one of the images she generated is displayed. Similarly, questioning artificial intelligence's perception of beauty is Past Life 08 (2021) by London-based artist Ben Cullen Williams and makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench. The photograph shows a person with distorted features, almost as if the image had been run through water. In fact, it is the result of training software on thousands of photographic portraits of intentionally marked and distorted faces. Conversely, with Filip Ćustić's sculpture pi(x)el (2022)—a body made of silicone and LED screens—a visitor can manually reconfigure certain features to create something unearthly.

The bodies on display in Somerset House are far from conventional. Distorted features, bulging eyes, or uncanny enhancements offer audiences a counterpoint to a performance of an 'authentic' aesthetic (here understood as Internet slang) prevalent online. They highlight how the freedom to choose what we present ourselves as is only an illusion. This contention will only become more urgent with the rise of AI, trained as it is on data that we feed it. "That's always the conversation with technology. It feels like it's outside of our bodies and outside of our human selves. But it is actually so human. So whatever bias or prejudice we bring from our physical selves is transmitted to technology,” Friis notes.

If our bias continues to affect the choices we are able to make, how can we determine what is 'beautiful'? For the exhibition, is beauty in the digital age meant to be a metric for identity, value or something more ineffable, a sense of self that can only be constructed in the presence of another? Virtual Beauty does not offer such absolute distinctions; instead, it revels in the liminality between authenticity and artifice.