By Marigold Warner
Playing with online displays of bodies, a new generation of artists is exploring the freedoms and restrictions of the digital world.
I remember the first photograph I posted of myself online. It was the mid-00s, I was 13, and the digital whirlpools of Myspace and MSN ruled my parentally-allotted daily hour of computer time. The image; a mirror selfie. Me, wearing a Pikachu onesie, with the glaring flash of my hot-pink digicam filling half the shot. There was a naivety to sharing photos online back then and, like many millennials, my first selfies were pixellated, badly cropped and shared to a follower count of around 20 school friends. Teenagers these days? Some have Facetune, fluorescent ring lights and front-facing HD cameras, ready to beam their latest snaps to an audience of millions.
It is not just the quality, quantity and reach of images that has advanced over time. The content has crawled into lucrative crevices that my generation could never have imagined. Research shows the majority of young people across the US, UK and Europe now use platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, where sharing selfies and choreographed dances is a primary mode of interaction. But these platforms do not just offer a means for communication. They exist within an attention economy that adds a transactional value to every image that is shared. Even if users are not literally trading money, these interactions operate as social currency. Regular people have become active participants in this marketplace, posting images of their bodies in exchange for likes, follows or attention.
Sharing such images online comes with various levels of tension. On the one hand, the democratisation of photo- sharing has been liberating, giving anyone with a camera the power to frame and share their own body exactly as they want it to be seen. But these images, and the platforms on which they exist, are deeply tethered to systems of commodification. Can bodies truly be liberated when we are using tools that are used to monitor, dominate and control?
The following artists have reflected on such questions through a variety of approaches – self-portraiture, digital manipulation, performance, collage and collaboration. Together, they reveal the many paradoxes of self- representation in the digital age, and offer a glimpse at how we might better understand how bodies are seen and consumed online.
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Philadelphia-based artist Qualeasha Wood has explored how Black femme bodies are simultaneously celebrated and exploited online, her signature jacquard textiles often embroidered with iPhone selfies and error messages. In The (Black) Madonna/Whore Complex – a piece acquired by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023 – a pop-up text reads ‘Young hot ebony is online’ with the CTA button, ‘Enter salvation’.
“I wanted to use language that made me uncomfortable,” says Wood. “I’d only ever seen the word ‘ebony’ used to describe a type of wood and then I saw it on PornHub.” Having grown up in a culture that shamed sexuality, Wood sought to confront this discomfort by reclaiming the language she feared most. “Someone was going to think it anyway, whether I said it or not… That became a ‘gotcha’ moment, a way to reclaim a slur and move forward.” Exploring the push-and-pull between liberation and fetishisation, Wood’s work also relates to her personal experience of how Black femme bodies are commodified online – and the labour to which they are exposed. When she first started gaining an online presence as an artist in the late-2010s, Wood found herself being simultaneously exalted and scapegoated. People expected her to be vocal and exemplary, a “model minority”. This visibility came with a surcharge, in which she was both exploited for her labour and denied the freedom to just exist.
“I would go to parties, and people would try to talk to me about cancel culture or their racist aunt. I’d be like, ‘It’s 1am, I’m drinking a beer, I’m not here to have this intellectual conversation!’” In the online world, “there is no such thing as privacy,” she continues. In many ways, these tapestries are “control without control”. “By controlling how I’m seen, I swing the pendulum back,” she explains. “I get to call attention to why we might gaze, why we might look, why we might care, or what we might be attracted to.”
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The article has been edited for length
