Challenging the Selfie: Perfect Skin by Chatonsky

Abstract

In the series Perfect Skin launched in 2015, Gregory Chatonsky, a French Canadian artist, ran an AI programme on the more than 5000 Tumblr and Instagram selfies posted by Kim Kardashian, to create distorted and serial representations of the celebrity which were then reproduced through a series of media: photo, video, textiles, ceramics, VR. Chatonsky challenges the genre of the selfie on several accounts. He highlights issues such as scale and exposure within the infoglut. Using algorithms also enables him to trigger cognitive and artistic shifts: from the visual arts to mathematics, from representation to data, from creative control to chance, from recognition to perceptual aporia, from social media to the gallery. These distorted and serialised images, “organes sans corps” to take up Deleuze’s famous concept, may pertain to a regime of meaning based on affect, as defined by Brian Massoumi, rather than on mimesis.

Keywords

• representation
• social media
• affect
• selfie
• portrait
• data