Gretchen Andrew, a former Silicon Valley engineer turned artist, critiques contemporary beauty standards shaped by digital manipulation in her series 'Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty'. Her works utilize AI tools like Facetune to enhance images of beauty pageant contestants, then employs robotics to create oil paintings that visually reflect the changes made by technology. This unsettling process emphasizes the disconnect between reality and digital images, revealing how far removed societal beauty standards have become. Andrew aims to showcase the discomfort produced by these manipulated portrayals, encouraging reflection on their impact on self-image and perceptions of beauty.
When I grew up it was commonly said that celebrities and pageant queens made beauty standards 'impossible'. Now, they are literally impossible.
The bodies we are seeing on social media do not exist; they are digitally manipulated portraits. I was drawn to the way technology and artificial intelligence (AI) were changing our perception of other people and of ourselves.
The robot, instructed by the discrepancies between the original image and an AI-modified (facetuned) version, adds brushstrokes where lines have changed.
The resulting works are unsettling, with the robotic scribbles cutting lines through the women's bodies and making their smiling faces unrecognisable-but that discomfort is the point.
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