Digital Re-Embodiment
"It's All About Shapes"
Vogue Italia (March 2016)
Photographer: Sølve Sundsbø
Stylist: Patti Wilson
Model: Anna Cleveland
Lately I have been thinking about the body in relation to online spaces. I was a child in the ‘90s and remember fantastical imaginings of humans augmenting the body within the computer age. It revealed a lot of the prevailing anxieties of the time, as we moved from analogue to digital. Robocop (1987) imagined the resurrected self and the psychological damage that would incur. But it was based very much in the physical world.
Ghost in the Shell (1995), along with Stand Alone Complex (2002-2005), was an incredible exploration into the philosophical issues surrounding augmented bodies and self-identity in a digital age. It would go on to inspire The Matrix (1999), which I remember dominating the public discourse throughout Y2K and the early ‘00s (it has unfortunately returned once again with all this red pill nonsense online). Within the Matrix your body was an imagined self, with every character having slick costumes and personal grooming, far removed from the grunge-y and grimy physicality of the “real” world.
As a blogger I have long been interested in the question of how we perform and negotiate identity online. It is a topic that has been well written about by academics such as Agnes Rocamora and Rosie Findlay. But these days I have been thinking about it terms of the body itself, after all, I am fascinated by the embodied experience of dress. It would seem at first glance that this is at odds with the online self, because the online experience is ostensibly dematerialised. We have moved away from physical objects to digital artefacts, with all manner of questions surrounding how we negotiate this. NFT bros are an amusing example of how people try to take advantage of this.
Dematerialisation exists in multiple forms. The phone has become the avenue through which so much is consumed and communicated these days. It has become the slab that houses our ideas, our memories, our dreams, our hopes, our loves, our hatreds, our families, our friends, and our identity. Could it also house our bodies? And depending on where you keep that information, there is no guarantee it will remain safe. Digital can often mean ephemeral. This could mean a service shutting down and data being lost – I find this to be the case when trying to look back to the menswear forums I used to participate in. But it can also mean that it is lost in the stream of constant information that floods social media.
We were once promised that the internet would allow us to transcend the body. To transcend physical experience itself. And yet, even during the dematerialisation phase of the early internet, things were always focused in some small way around the human form. Whether it was MSN Messenger, online forums, or other early digital meeting spaces, you always had room for a profile photo or digital avatar and people would use early emoji (whether image or text based). Unless you uploaded one yourself, you account would be provided a generic image, usually that of a simplified human profile.
Whereas it was common in those early days, we now associate the stock avatar with loss of personhood. A Twitter profile with no custom avatar (so using the stock floating head above shoulders) is assumed to be an automated bot, or viewed as equally unhuman, an anonymous troll. Anonymity is treated with suspicion. It is expected whether you use your real name and whether you use your own image, that you still pick a visual identity that can be performed. But what interests me is that is ordinarily based on the human body.
Think of video games where we have a whole industry built on the idea of customisation. Whether spending hours on The Sims to craft your character just right having paid for additional clothes, or buying skins on Fortnite, it is a multi-billion dollar industry. I always find it amusing when people on social media say that digital fashion will never take off, when it already has. People have paid for digital clothing for years, just not for their own online bodies, but their gaming characters and avatars.
But what is to say that is any less part of our self and identity? What is to say it is any less part of our bodies? I am thinking here of the theory of extended self – that our notion of self extends beyond our bodies, to the networks and objects surrounding us. How many people have left their phone behind and felt a phantom vibration in their pocket? And we only have to look at the social issues facing younger generations when it comes to online bullying, or indeed the sickening trend of deep fake pornography.
Anonymity still exists, but it revolves around customisation and the creation and performance of an identity to be played. And again, it seems body focused, whether it be Apple’s Memoji or apps like WhatsApp and Instagram having the option to create your avatar. This is more so apparent in VR and metaverses, where we inhabit digital bodies. We are encouraged to create a cartoon body, a digital body, a visual identity tied down to a body. But then I would argue this can also be applied generally to images we share online of ourselves anyway. Not only do people choose the most flattering photo, the use of filters and editing is expected now. Instead of dematerialisation, we have a rapid re-embodiment process.
I am reminded of plastic surgeons talking of “Snapchat dysphoria” as people came to them during the height of Snapchat usage to ask to look more like their filtered selves. And then there is the number of people who have a skewed idea of what they look like because they are used to the wide-angle lens of the selfie camera on their phone that distorts the proportion of their faces. I have included a reference image below I found on Google in case you are wondering:
I do wonder whether re-embodiment could move beyond the human body. Whether digital fashion could allow us to dress bodies that do not currently exist and could never exist in the physical world. Would people even be able to identify with that? Could it exist within fashion or could it only exist in art? Could we ever truly transcend the body itself?
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