The Acceleration of Digital Sags and Wrinkle Skin Pixels
The following is from a lecture at the New York Gender Symposium 2025 : Gendered Bodies, Gendered Justic
I want to see more digital sags, more pixelated curved edges, more data-worn pixel surfaces…
Link to the lecture slides^
I am in the business of seeing, making, and negotiating the image of bodies [1]. I make album photos for musical artists, source material for pitch decks, outline and create websites, generate visual intimacies, scroll Instagram, send TikToks, film shorts, and write about my curiosities and challenges.
The body is the primary material—celled, meaty, subject—simulated by these pixels, even if the bodies are first translated by clay, paint, or animation. The body itself, before it becomes (any layer of) simulated image, already mediates an endless array of assumption, consumption, and presumption. In Disidentification, Muñoz describes the body a field of cultural struggles and social rehearsals, where meanings are inscribed and constantly contested through performative acts [2]. That is, the body houses our phenomenological perceptions and, as such, remains the primary site in which we negotiate ourselves and one another. The body contains the eyes with which we see our laptop screens, the fingers we use to type and press buttons, the chin that folds as we look to our phones—the sensory information that becomes the data activated by bodies with material and immaterial affect. Because of this, I am in the practice of looking (and sometimes creating) that which I do not see.
I do not think that representation—especially in isolation, without other considerations—is the end-all-be-all or that it precipitates a liberatory outcome. Hypervisibility in the digital realm often creates a trap where trans, queer, and non-white bodies are more surveilled than liberated by visibility. Huxtable points points out that “visibility is being used to sabotage actual engagement with real questions of structural negligence and discrimination and violence. It’s promoting problematic hegemonic ideas about what bodies are or are not legitimate.” She, and Tourmaline Gossett extend this conversation naming the violence that can result directly from visibility itself [3].
So I refer not to the need for arbitrary representation or mere inclusion within failing hierarchical systems of power. (This would perhaps fall into what Audre Lorde refers to as The Master’s Tools [4], and there are many liberatory feats achieved by falling outside of inclusion, as addressed in The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam[5]). Material autonomy is often co-opted and proliferated by digital representation—again, endless examples of this, as addressed by Legacy Russell in Black Meme , Aria Dean in Poor Meme, Rich Meme & Notes on Blacceleration, and Safiya Noble in Algorithms of Oppression [6].
In a recent conversation with Andrius Alvarez-Backus, he and I discussed the ways in which we personally grapple with this in our creation of multidisciplinary art—often desiring to create abstraction or narrativized bodies of flesh as we wrestle with this dichotomy [7].
And yet. We must notice what is excluded.
And yet. I really do want to see—and not just think about—more wrinkles.
Perceiving, in itself, remains deeply important as it informs our embodied biases, erasures, assumptions, rejections, and acceptances. Asking what is missing from the barrage of daily images, or what is missing from the (perceptual—visual, sonic, textual…) descriptors more broadly, requires us to identify the areas of our own overlooking.
Overlooking (i.e., individual, social, and political erasure) reflects the hierarchical within the hegemonic. Much of this is obvious, but how often do we actually take the time to interrogate what we don't see—especially in comparison to the constancy of our ever-present flow of pixel-images, where galleries become digital storefronts, and Google searches elicit and reflect archives of body and body-making? Many have taken on the work of identifying, challenging, and navigating the countless problems that arise when bodies are represented digitally—to varying degrees, with varying methodologies, and in various contexts. The contexts, methods, and degrees to which these bodies are circulated generate ways of being that marginalize (many of those individuals mentioned previously, alongside people like Paul B. Preciado, Saidiya Hartman, Simone Browne, and Hito Steyerl…).
Erasures and objectifications of personhoods proliferate—reductions and stereotyping occur. How often algorithms could and do not work to address discrepancies that further and generate marginalizations. Potential counteractive measures are instead replaced by—and become—cybernetic fleshy balls that roll down hills of "x"s and "o"s at increasing speeds until someone types a metaphorical foot to stop it, or a tiny stone is thrown to slow it down.
What astounds me—though perhaps it shouldn’t, because of the algorithmic balls’ escalation—are the images that I have difficulty finding, even when I look for them.
In a recent exhibit, I was building a wall of mosaicked forms (check out here)[8]. I sought out aged forms, sagging forms, wrinkled forms—desiring to not relegate the body to taut, white skin. In programs like Cosmos, Pinterest, Google Image Search, and the Wayback Machine Internet Archive, "butt" showed almost exclusively white, thin-waisted butts. Sagging skin, wrinkled breasts, flaccid penises, intersex genitals, flappy labias—missing. So many bodies, fragmented, were rarely there unless explicitly specified, and barely there even when I did. What stood out to me this time was the lack of age—something I recognize as a flaw in my work in my “The Nude (but male-ish)” project, as I was working mostly within my own networks, so it has been on my mind [9].
Representations—lack of, erasures, hypervisibilities—have been written and discussed endlessly, and yet, it's something that remains so present. It remains so much the norm that we consistently overlook it until we ourselves are in the excluded group. At this moment, I am caught up in the systemic assumption of youth and the assumption of desired youth. How are wrinkles, in the context of femininity, so radical? They, of course, are not—but it would appear as such if we focused our gaze on sculptures and digitally mediated representations.
We must ask ourselves to look—and look again in order to work on and against dominant harmful ideologies. What is it that we don’t see? Why? In what contexts? With what frequencies? By interrogating what is missing from our visual and algorithmic landscapes, we open up new ways of seeing, resisting, and counteracting the accelerating flow of exclusionary digital images.
I look to people like Garrett Bradley, who seeks to repopulate searches for "America" by titling their film America [10], and Legacy Russell, who points to the furtherance of digital blackface and the profitability of meme culture at the expense of others [11].
What stones can we throw to stop the ball from rolling at ever-increasing speeds within digital circulation? What queer refusals can we generate? What digital feet can we build to block paths and create new pixel bodies?
If you would like to be part of The Nude (but male-ish) and participate in an anonymous recorded conversation, with the possibility of a platonic nude photoshoot - please reach out: here.
For any other inquiries, please reach out to the same email or go to www.chimerarene.com
[2] Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Cultural Studies of the Americas, Vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. https://some.claims/assets/Disidentifications_Queers_of_color_and_the_performance_of_politics.pdf.
[3] Huxtable, Juliana, and Tourmaline Gossett. "Transcendence and Other Forms of Black Feminist Thought: A Conversation." In Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, 123-136. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. p. 44.
Also to hear more of this conversation please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJYEUOwA4fc
[4] Lorde, Audre. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 94–101. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981. PDF version, https://monoskop.org/images/2/2b/Lorde_Audre_1983_The_Masters_Tools_Will_Never_Dismantle_the_Masters_House.pdf.
[5] Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
[6] Russell, Legacy. Black Meme. New York: Verso, 2020.
Dean, Aria. "Poor Meme, Rich Meme." Real Life Magazine, July 25, 2016. https://reallifemag.com/poor-meme-rich-meme/.
Dean, Aria. "Notes on Blacceleration." e-flux Journal, no. 87 (December 2017). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/87/169402/notes-on-blacceleration/.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
[7] This conversation is in reference to a conversation held at 25 East Gallery on February 3, 2025: view more details here.
To learn more about Andrius Alvarez-Backus, please visit his website: https://andrius-ab.com/
[8] Please view: here: https://www.chimerarene.com/12/
[9] Something may can consider is that contemporarily, as people age they are less likely to take selfies. But, of course, it is not only this. Otherwise we would see more sagging boobs, butts, and skin. I was excited by this LOWE campaign with Maggie Nelson.
[10] To learn more about Garrett Bradley, please go to their website: https://www.garrettabradley.com/
Bradley, Garrett. America. 29 min. Field of Vision, 2021. https://fieldofvision.org/shorts/america.
[11] Russell, Legacy. Black Meme. New York: Verso, 2020.