Hyperimage
2022
Site-specific video, 3’18’’, color
Hyperimage displayed on the media facade of Etopia Centre for Art & Technology in Zaragoza, Spain, during June 2022. Video by Nestor Lizalde.
Hyperimage is a digital video artwork created specifically for the media facade of the Etopia Centre for Art & Technology in Zaragoza, Spain.
This video work critically approaches the visual representation of women in contemporary social media. At the outset of the process, a search for images published as posts on the social media platform Instagram under the hashtag #woman was performed. By searching this single keyword, a plethora of sexualized and stereotyped images of girls, women and their body parts immediately appear.
Confronted with this infinite scroll of stylized, infantilized photographs and selfies centered predominantly on physical appearance, fashion and beauty products, the question arises: Does this digital hyperimagery actually reflect how womanhood is defined in the age of social media?
On one hand, each of these images, categorized by the social platform users as descriptive of women, can be read as a visual representation of prevailing socio-cultural assumptions about women within that specific online community. On the other hand, each digital image can be read in its purely computational essence as an array of pixels carrying discrete values ranging from 0 to 255.
As the basis for this digital video work, three photographs indexed under the hashtag #woman were randomly retrieved using an Instagram image scraper. These photographs were used as input data for the generation of the three-dimensional digital landscape. Through the technique of image instancing, each pixel value from the RGB range was translated into specific positional and dimensional coordinates in three-dimensional space, converting the stereotyped visual representation of women into an exploration of its underlying digital topography.
Images above: Hyperimage displayed on the media facade of Etopia Centre for Art & Technology.
Video still from Hyperimage.
Artist's comment on the Hyperimage video work.