*digital imagery, site-specific installation
By presenting a series of artificially created, unnatural-looking portraits that have been excessively edited using the renowned photo-retouching app Facetune, the digital installation “FR (Filtered Reality)” critically questions the growing popularity of advanced image-editing tools as well as the distribution of hyperrealistic AI-generated contents within the cyberspace.
Through a standardized guide similar to the typical, exaggerated look of caricature paintings, resulting in the displayed faces appearing almost identical, these digital images reveal the actual absurdity within the unrealistic beauty standards that are currently being promoted on social media while refering to the on-going loss of individual beauty in relation to online phenomena including the content creator-based normalization of plastic surgery, the current accessibility of AR beauty filters and contemporary trends within popular Internet culture such as the “perfect face template”. These recent developments, associated with the omnipresent pressure to constantly look pretty and appear visually flawless that becomes especially apparent within female-presenting users, are ultimately based in patriarchal structures and the unattainable ideals propagated within late-stage capitalism in order to promote excessive consumerism through the influence of digital media, a condition under which women have become a type of digital prey that is constantly being confronted with apparent ways to look even better while this process is simultaneously making them feel as if they can never truly be “good enough”.
Re-interpreting the Internet slang term “for real”—usually abbreviated as “fr” in a chatting context—by giving its acronym a new meaning that instead imitates the typical names of contemporary Extended Reality (XR) technologies, the work’s title additionally raises the question whether the so-called “digital reality” of the Internet is really an extension of our physical world or has already lost its credibility due to the latest advances within the field of visual manipulation.
(2025)