Michael Whitham + Aidan Larned
The Body for Broadcast: Synthetic Selves and the Post-Photographic Condition
From its inception, photography has been haunted by artifice. Before generative AI, the most prominent inflection point was the advent of Photoshop. Fred Ritchin noted, “Photography used to imply presence, ‘I was there.’ Now it implies possibility, ‘This could have happened.’”
Today, identity is no longer a snapshot. It’s a showroom, a skin, an interface. Polished, parameterized, always pending updates. We are not just seeing more images. We’re seeing more selves. Curated. Filtered. Stretched and idealized.
Our presentation will explore how photography’s shift from record towards digital construction overlaps with the widespread creation of synthetic selves. Generative AI, face filters, deepfakes, and avatars don’t just manipulate images, they normalize identity as something designed, optimized, and performed. We’ll ask how these tools might alter our relationship to authenticity, beauty, and the evolving boundaries of the self.
What does it mean to look like “yourself” in 2025? And whose eyes are you looking through when you decide?
As psychoanalyst Susie Orbach observed, “the terrain of the body is changing.” Many now manage two bodies: the physical one in jogging pants, and the digital one “for broadcast” — augmented, filtered, detached. As AI accelerates, we’re seeing not just media manipulation but a deepening psychological split between the self that is lived and the self that is shown.
This divide echoes the pressure to create a “personal brand,” a process Naomi Klein critiques for “entrenching fixed and phony selves.” And shouldn’t we be cautious? As Delia Cai put it: “You’re a person, not a brand… the business is standing on you.” As branding logic merges with identity, we risk reducing ourselves to the logic of The Sims: a world of narrow binaries (“tough” vs. “feminine”), mutually exclusive and depressingly reductive.
Yet synthetic image-making is not inherently hollow. In I Heard Her Call My Name, Lucy Sante describes how FaceApp helped her visualize and affirm her trans identity: a simple app became a gateway to self-recognition. A 2022 Tsinghua University study, I Found a More Attractive Deepfaked Self, found that AI-generated representations could aid those with body image disturbance, a condition notoriously resistant to treatment.
Tools like Apple’s Vision Pro, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and humble Instagram filters blur the boundary between digital and embodied existence. The visual language of selfhood is no longer photographic. It can be speculative, hyperreal, and performative.
In a moment gripped by fear and suspicion around AI, our presentation will ask: what if we viewed filters, avatars, and AI faces not as lies, but as sketches — rehearsals of selves, glimpses of latent truths? What if we stopped asking, “Is this real?” and started asking: “Does this help me feel more like me?”
Increasingly, brands, businesses, and tech platforms are not just mirrors of culture but makers of it. How might they support experimentation with self-expression rather than codifying it? Can they build tools that allow for play, plurality, or reinvention? What role might they play in expanding, rather than restricting, how we understand and inhabit digital identity?
What might be gained if we saw synthetic images not as threats to authenticity, but as invitations?
Today, identity is no longer a snapshot. It’s a showroom, a skin, an interface. Polished, parameterized, always pending updates. We are not just seeing more images. We’re seeing more selves. Curated. Filtered. Stretched and idealized.
Our presentation will explore how photography’s shift from record towards digital construction overlaps with the widespread creation of synthetic selves. Generative AI, face filters, deepfakes, and avatars don’t just manipulate images, they normalize identity as something designed, optimized, and performed. We’ll ask how these tools might alter our relationship to authenticity, beauty, and the evolving boundaries of the self.
What does it mean to look like “yourself” in 2025? And whose eyes are you looking through when you decide?
As psychoanalyst Susie Orbach observed, “the terrain of the body is changing.” Many now manage two bodies: the physical one in jogging pants, and the digital one “for broadcast” — augmented, filtered, detached. As AI accelerates, we’re seeing not just media manipulation but a deepening psychological split between the self that is lived and the self that is shown.
This divide echoes the pressure to create a “personal brand,” a process Naomi Klein critiques for “entrenching fixed and phony selves.” And shouldn’t we be cautious? As Delia Cai put it: “You’re a person, not a brand… the business is standing on you.” As branding logic merges with identity, we risk reducing ourselves to the logic of The Sims: a world of narrow binaries (“tough” vs. “feminine”), mutually exclusive and depressingly reductive.
Yet synthetic image-making is not inherently hollow. In I Heard Her Call My Name, Lucy Sante describes how FaceApp helped her visualize and affirm her trans identity: a simple app became a gateway to self-recognition. A 2022 Tsinghua University study, I Found a More Attractive Deepfaked Self, found that AI-generated representations could aid those with body image disturbance, a condition notoriously resistant to treatment.
Tools like Apple’s Vision Pro, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and humble Instagram filters blur the boundary between digital and embodied existence. The visual language of selfhood is no longer photographic. It can be speculative, hyperreal, and performative.
In a moment gripped by fear and suspicion around AI, our presentation will ask: what if we viewed filters, avatars, and AI faces not as lies, but as sketches — rehearsals of selves, glimpses of latent truths? What if we stopped asking, “Is this real?” and started asking: “Does this help me feel more like me?”
Increasingly, brands, businesses, and tech platforms are not just mirrors of culture but makers of it. How might they support experimentation with self-expression rather than codifying it? Can they build tools that allow for play, plurality, or reinvention? What role might they play in expanding, rather than restricting, how we understand and inhabit digital identity?
What might be gained if we saw synthetic images not as threats to authenticity, but as invitations?
Michael Whitham and Aidan Larned are writers, creatives, and strategists who have worked together at the independent creative agency Hugo & Marie since 2021. They co-author Helium, the agency’s ongoing essay series that explores how visual language, cultural trends, and ideas of identity intersect with branding and media. Aidan also independently writes, edits, and designs a series of zines and small-run publications, often in collaboration with other artists. Michael holds an MA in the History of Art, with a focus on postmodern photography, and previously spent a decade as a commissioner, creative director, and photographic producer for major international recording artists. Since 2024 he has been a mentor for NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator that supports innovation at the intersection of art, design, science, and technology. Together, their work at Hugo & Marie explores how images, language, and cultural signals shape, and are shaped by, the systems we live inside.