The etymological lineage of the words digital and analogue reveal each word’s original denoted meaning has shifted over time to contemporary connotations that are arguably oppositional to the start of the chain.

The etymology of the digital is as follow,

Digitus (Latin): finger/toe > Digit (English): numbers below 10 > Digital (English): finger/number associated > Digital (English): using numerical digits.¹

And analogue, 

Analogos (Greek) or Analogus (Latin): Proportionate: according to ratio > Analogue (English) a person or thing seen to be comparable to another > Analogue (art/practice) (English): created using traditional or original materials or methods.²

Observing the etymology of each word unveils that their linguistic origins appear distinct from their contemporary connotations and current usage. The general usage of these words disregards or is unaware of their lineage and is a part of the way knowledge is dynamically defined, transferred and transformed. This epistemological chain is currently threatened by the ‘black box’ of Large Language Models (LLMs).

Generally, contemporary connotations of the digital evokes something artificial, unembodied, synthetic, virtual, or even unreal. Whereas the term analogue, contrarily, suggests that something is authentic, natural, physical or original. Paradoxically, when we look back to the origin of both words, we find that digital has its origins in the body, whereas analogue has its roots in the proportionate copy. It is at this intersection of the body as data (the digital {Digitus: finger/toe}), and the copy (the analogue material {Analogos: proportionate according to ratio}) where my practice conjugates.

My practice engages abstraction and mediation of both photographic imagery and collated data of the body as a means of investigation. I often use the mode of self-portraiture to probe technology’s impact on my own autonomy and body, as seen in the work BIO-IDENTIFIER_1. My practice engages with material transformed into information, which is then poetically converted back into a physical form. Here, an inherent abstraction occurs and reveals new ideas, as McKenzie Wark describes in A Hacker Manifesto, where ‘…abstraction relies on the material world’s most curious quality—information… It is at once material and immaterial. It discovers the immaterial virtuality of material, its qualities of information’.³

#NoFilter: Mediation via Altered Images 

Contemporary life is mediated by images, which results in a maelstrom of copied, reproduced, and shared visual information. In the words of Guy Debord, ‘The spectacle… is a social relation between people that is mediated by images… {it is not} a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.’⁴ This is now compounded by another layer of mediation, where images are increasingly altered, filtered, or even entirely generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Distorted images and AI generated slop are muddying the whirlpool of contemporary image culture materialising as objective reality.

In my work Clever Hans Learns 4+2=6, I explore how images filter perception and the truths those images may or may not inherit. ‘Clever Hans’, the so-called smartest horse in the world, appeared to solve maths and spelling problems presented by his trainer but it was just an illusion; in reality, the horse was merely responding to his trainer’s unintentional, subtle cues.⁵ Author Kate Crawford, in The Atlas of AI, finds Hans's story compelling for its insight into ‘the relationship between desire, illusion… the business of spectacles, how we anthropomorphise the nonhuman, how biases emerge and the politics of intelligence’.⁶

My work depicts an image of Hans installed on a glass gallery window. The screen-printed image, situated on the physical, yet not highly visible, boundary of the window, visually suggests the fact that each individual's perception filters knowledge, potentially creating illusions in the mediation process. The picture on the window flips depending on  one’s viewing angle, either from within the spectacle of the gallery or from the public space of the footpath outside, underscoring the complex interplay of knowledge, truth, and bias.

I examined the cycle of mediation in this work also through the methodology I employed to distill the information of the image. As seen in Diagram 1, I repeatedly filtered the original photograph of Hans through image sharing, social media editing software, fabricating a compression artefact. This is a technique that abstracts the analogue photograph through a computer optic methodology. Like an accelerated case study of Hito Steyerl’s notion of the 'poor image', the pixel make-up of the JPEG file was corrupted through purposeful degeneration, altering the representational image of the horse to a state of abstraction.⁷

The Body Extracted: Surveillance 

Another facet of my practice is interrogating how the body is extracted via corporate surveillance. Our actions are tracked, converted to data, and analysed by corporations, shaping us without transparent consent. In The Extreme Self, Basar, Coupland, and Obrist state that ‘There’s no escaping your face. You are your face. You become your face. You became your face. Or you end up with the face you deserve.’⁸ The authors emphasise how facial recognition linked to identity, biases, and biometric data are extracted and exploited in today’s digital world in an omnipresent and dystopic manner.

An early investigation into this phenomenon was conducted in 2019 when Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen created the project ImageNet Roulette, which trained an AI algorithm with selected training data from Image Net Data Sets. The work exposed ‘the biases and politics behind these problematic datasets… the process of classification at its root is a continuation of embedded systemic biases such as racism and misogyny.’⁹

In the years since this project, the intensity, ubiquity and intimacy of facial recognition have increased dramatically, exemplified by the Coldplay Jumbotron Scandal in 2025. The people involved in this surveillance scandal did not ask to be investigated by the world, ‘they weren't famous. They weren't criminals… Welcome to the wild west period of ambient surveillance, not just by governments, not just by companies, but by each other, all of us.’¹⁰ The technology used to survey one another is increasingly accessible. Common facial recognition search engine examples like PimEyes use the massive data sets of the Clearview AI, which in the words of Kashmir Hill, is ‘…taking away that ability to be anonymous because they {are} making faces searchable in the same way that Google made our name searchable.’¹¹

Met with controversy, The Australian Federal Police have been found using the PimEyes facial recognition database. In 2023 Greens senator David Shoebridge suggested that the search engine is ‘a particularly dangerous facial recognition tool … {which has been repeatedly criticised for enabling unlawful surveillance and stalking.’¹² I enacted a digital investigation by uploading my own biometric data to PimEyes. As someone with a female body, I am particularly terrified by this technology, and its close relative, the deepfake. This fear is intensified by recent investigations where, for example, it has been found that online open source library Hugging Face hosts at least 5000 nonconsensual AI models or deepfakes of real people (as opposed to celebrities or public figures).¹³ As seen in Diagram 2, when I performed this experiment on PimEyes, the results presented some old photos of myself lurking in the archives of the internet, some expected doppelgangers, but most frighteningly, was a series of pixelated images with links to explicit content. Having seen these pixelated links, I was hesitant to discover what waited for me at the other end of the hyperlink. The potential for revenge pornography or deepfakes hijacking my biometric data and likeness is a real threat. In this instance, with this facial recognition database, I didn’t find any exploitive imagery of my own body. My work Webcam Doppelgänger depicts an unidentifiable depiction of my findings, an online worker who has a similar likeness to myself. Screen printing her blurred resemblance as a multilayered CMYK print transposes the visual data into a physicality, parallelling the real-world impact that hijacked images of individuals can have.

We are currently in a pivotal moment of surveillance and censorship as many governments plan to—or are already—introducing legislation requiring internet users to upload identification to access ‘adult content’ online. The recent enforcement of the UK’s Online Safety Act (2023) which claims to ‘protect children and adults online’ is an irreversible step in mass surveillance that will exponentially increase these harms and intimately invade privacy.¹⁴ As reported on U.S. technology news website The Verge, although The Act is focused on blocking ‘pornography and content that promotes suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders', it has concurrently blocked access to content which ‘provide valued community support and resources for adults and minors alike’, including subreddits like ‘r/periods, r/stopsmoking, r/stopdrinking, and r/sexualassault’ thus censoring minors from content that could be crucial for their wellbeing.¹⁵ The Act and the popularity of similar identification systems among government legislators around the world are also invasive to the adults who need to prove their identity. Online ‘content providers must either institute age verification, through facial recognition or other digital identity verification tools, for British visitors or face fines up to £18 million…’¹⁶ Yet, in the same few weeks, ‘an app called Tea… asked users for photo or ID verification to prove that they were women… marketed as a way to protect women from abusers… all of the users’ personal info leaked… 72,000 images, which included verification selfies and government IDs, were stolen in the hack… Now, imagine all of this happening to an entire country.’¹⁷ All of the fears associated with biometric recognition, biases, deepfakes and surveillance are exacerbated by laws like The Online Safety Act.

Algorithmic Curation

Digital surveillance creates a feedback loop for users. In Hypernormalisation, director Adam Curtis uses the phrase, ‘if you liked that, you’ll love this’ to describe the cycle of targeted advertising.¹⁸ With the collation of individualised data, algorithms curate personalised content. As our autonomy is skewed, content we consume is dictated by commercially driven algorithms, and our bodies are targeted. An internal study by Meta found that Instagram actively harms users.¹⁹ In an ouroboros-like cycle, the content that targets users on social media platforms commodify the body while distorting our perspectives of our own bodies.

When consuming content on Instagram, one targeted advertisement I was frequently fed was for an app called MeThreeSixty, a commercial 3D body visualizer.  This app exemplifies how bodies are extracted and reshaped through contemporary surveillance. By scanning users via phone cameras, it creates virtual abstractions of their bodies, aiming to inspire physical change through ‘future me’ projections, and a subscription fee. 

My work MeThreeSixty is a warped self-portrait that uses this application as visual mediation. I experimented with the app and screen-recorded my experience. Taking a screenshot from the performance, I stretched the image, distorting the shape into an undulating slither. The physical shape of the materialised print on the industrial aluminium mimics the contours of the digital image, actualising the digital impact physically suggesting the corporeal effect of this technology. The reflective surface and scale of the work echoes that of a mirror.

Material Reflections 

More recently I have been exploring other contemporary surveillance technologies as tools for re-presenting the body. Using computer optics as a methodology and studio experiment, I aim through my work to reveal hidden power structures.

Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism is an empowering and energising manifesto, motivating me in the mode of digitally mediated self-portraiture. Russell’s influence on my practice, with their take on the self and identity, is exemplified by the following quote, ‘the glitched self is always on the move. This diasporic journey of online to offline is a mode of parthenogenesis, reproducing oneself without fertilisation—splitting, merging, emerging. This is the rubric for an embodied political technology that queers proudly, creating space for new bodies and cosmic selves.’²⁰ My practice traverses through this fluctuating cycle of consuming and generating content, probing the impact on the self as we split, merge and emerge. By enacting the glitch to interrogate our parthenogenesis, I unpack the power of artifice inherent in images and the way users are manipulated and impacted within the algorithmically curated attention economy as we reproduce our identities.

In Shannon Vallor’s book, The AI Mirror, they use of the mirror as a multifaceted, extended metaphor. Her research felt like a complementary poetic and investigative output to what I was engaged with in my practice. One of the facets of the metaphor Vallor uses to describe AI is an intertextual link to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the story of Narcissus,

When we are engaged with a large language model and find ourselves suddenly struck by its apparent wit or insight, we must realize that we are very much like Narcissus talking to himself, his words dimly mirrored and transformed by Echo’s lips. The only difference is that, unlike Echo, behind a large language model there is no suppressed, silent agent struggling to speak her own thoughts. Unlike Echo, a large language model returns to us not our own recent utterances, but a statistical variation on the collected, digitized words of untold millions.²¹

Vallor uses the text as an allegory to help us understand the intricacies of LLMs, as opposed to the embodied knowledge which is deep down in the character Echo. When synthesising Russel’s feminist take on digital spaces and identities with Vallor’s use of the Narcissus story to allegorically unpack the mechanisms and impact of AI, I was drawn to Echo as the supporting character in that story through the feminist lens of Russel. Echo’s power of repetition, her inability to perform anything other than the echoes of others is contemporarily reverberated in the existential threat of LLMs as they echo our data back to us. The resulting ‘slosh and slop’, generated in both words and image, is composed of computationally digested data which is metabolised and excreted, to use the visceral metaphor shared by Kate Crawford in her talk at the Visions Conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2024.²² Yet many of us are just like Narcissus: too infatuated with the online identities we reflect to the world (and ourselves) to notice the epistemological threat and power of this repeated information. I fear that the future of knowledge, truth and consensual reality is threatened by the repetition of data without traceable sources, and I fear that we may face the same tragic curse as Echo.  In the words of Shannon Vallor, ‘AI systems mirror our own intelligence back to us… A selective amnesia that loosens our grip on our own human agency and clouds our self-knowledge… {AI} is an illusion that can ensnare even the most technologically adept among us… ^{we are} talking to ^our own reflection.’²³

My work Echo: Autofabrication employs technological mediation of the body as a means by which to ponder the way that contemporary surveillance presents a reflection of ourselves and our collective data accumulation. This work uses a 3D scan of myself which I digitally repeated and warped like a reflection in water. I took a screenshot of this hybridised 3D model and converted the data into a flat relief model. Here, I enact Legacy Russell’s ‘splitting, merging and emerging’ by cutting the model in half before materialising it as a 3D print.²⁴ The repetition, asymmetry and hybrid nature of this work echoes the many identities the self inhabits, the way we reflect performed selves, the multitudes of data our bodies contain and how it can all be extracted from us.

I continued to probe the material of the 3D print by pushing into an analogue mode of image generation. Here you can see an animation which I made as part of my sculptural video work Hymn to the {extreme} Self, taking the virtual model I made for the previous work to create a simple revolving animation. I then interrupted the make-up of the animation by extracting frames, simplifying them to visual data, and converting them to topographic slides where the various tonal values in the image have different degrees of opacity, intervening with the penetration of light. After printing, I rephotographed each frame and stitched it back together to create a 3D printed animation. 

Hymn to the ^extreme Self layers different mediated imagery to visualise contemporary capitalist surveillance and its subjective impact. The relief sculpture blends a flat image with physical depth, while the apertures in the aluminium reveal screen fragments where the image both connects, echoes and ruptures. The piece explores the virtual versus the real, challenging the artifice of image and data. It questions how corporate surveillance shapes our agency and self-perception.

The Hymn of the title is a reference to a sung praise. Post the death of God in a Nietzschean sense, the self has become proliferated and worshipped: self-worship, self-healing, self-shaping, auto-fabrication. This condition is amplified by the growth of parasocial relationships, influencers and K-pop stars who reign as deities and goddesses. In the work, this metaphor is expanded by the liturgical nature of the text and the ominous robotic “female” voice narrating. If the performed self is the new God, then the technology which holds and proliferates it is the bible and the church. And like transubstantiation, the artifice of the virtual self becomes corporeal body and blood. 

A third work in this series, Cartographic Collapse: Cross Section is another iteration of this portrait. A map may be considered as a reality that is abstracted and defined by those in power. In Cartographic Collapse, my body is abstracted and defined by means of data. The work is a depiction of the same 3D model present in the previous two works discussed. Although not literally a map, the internal structures of the 3D print informed by my photogrammetry self-portraiture resembles the language of drawn maps, and references the power claimed through reality-defining cartography. This image was etched into aluminium, emphasising the industrialisation of the body and playing with the poetic potential of the reflection.

Just as maps are drawn by those with power, so is the body defined, commodified and extracted through digital behavioural and optical surveillance. I have started to explore and discover other ways I can use my biometric data to construct material and visual output, an example seen here in the frame of Cartographic Collapse: Cross Section. As technology is insidiously burrowing into the fabric of social existence and culture, through my work I attempt to reveal the artifice, like the act of unveiling the copy in the Fable of Borges’ Map.²⁵

Enacting glitch is a feminist act, slipping from the ouroboros cycle of digital surveillance and meditation: here, my body is extracted, it is data. My practice documents, mediates and reflects the performance of extraction to the viewer as a means of interrogation.