*digital imagery, site-specific installation
By presenting a series of artificially created, unnatural-looking portraits that have been excessively edited using the famous photo-retouching app Facetune, the digital installation “FR (Filtered Reality)” critically questions the growing popularity of advanced image-editing technology 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, making the different faces look almost identical, these digital images reveal the actual absurdity within the unrealistic aesthetic norms that are currently being promoted on social media—additionally reinforced through the exclusivity of Western beauty standards mostly focusing on strictly Eurocentric features—while simultaneously refering to the on-going loss of individual beauty in relation to online phenomena including the social media-based advocation and normalization of plastic surgery, the general accessibility of AR beauty filters and contemporary trends within Internet culture such as the “perfect face template”. These recent developments, directly associated with the omnipresent pressure to be seen as socially likeable and 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 push an excessive consumerism using the influensive mechanisms of the virtual space: A condition under which women have unconsciously become a type of digital prey inevitably perceived and controlled by the male gaze, constantly being confronted with new tools and products to apparently improve how they look and feel about themselves while this process is actually making them believe that they can never truly be “good enough”.
Re-interpreting the popular 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 “virtual 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)