Final Project

HyperEssay2

Viena and I was highly inspired by Dove beauty campaigns and CGI generated instagram accounts/models such as Lil Miquela and Shudu.Gram.

On top of these, we were also inspired by John Berger’s book named ‘Ways of Seeing’, where he wrote about the perception of beauty in the society. In one passage, he stated that the females figures illustrated in oil paintings in the past were to feed the spectator’s (who is very often males) appetite, while objectifying the females that were present in the picture. The female is not a participant, but rather, an object.

Inline with this notion, Instagram is might be subconsciously fuelling this negative behaviour as users continue to judge and place beauty standards onto the females on this online platform.

Hence, Viena and I decided to create avatars by combining several female features together in an attempt to recreate the most beautiful person. As we are also aware that a person’s character does play a part on how people perceive the female, we also recreated different personalities that are attractive to our audiences.

Our project investigates what makes a woman beautiful, and to find that ideal standard to which our followers have. The aspects of Internet Art and Culture this project touches on is the viewer’s interaction, the collaborate artwork, and avatars.

To do so, we made our work highly participative by letting our viewers name the facial features and females which they find attractive. In order to find who is the most attractive, we did so by turning everything into a beauty contest, where our followers can rate the women accordingly.

Live broadcasting allows us to get real-time data and have direct communication with our audiences. Through this advantage, we are able to collate the votes for the final winner on the spot, giving a suspense factor to our project. On top of this, it is highly expandable. For example, Jinyee and I were able to raise the interactivity between the avatars and the viewers by playing a VO that was recorded before the stream itself. Which was a pleasant surprise to our audience. 

Live broadcasting also allows us to expand our project even more, as we can stream it onto much bigger audiences from the other side of the world. Online viewers can also comment on the video when we are streaming live, which add on an interesting element of live interaction between performers and viewers.

One week of interaction with the audience on Instagram, from data collection to voting to live video, we are amazed at how one platform allow us to do so much and presenting this live video that we are proud of.