'fetish doll | bound by design'

Tonight, I evolved a project I have been working on recently and submitted it to the Superchief Gallery 'Bad Glitches Only Redux' open call for exhibition at Nox Gallery in Tokyo. 

My submission is a new, un-minted piece called ‘fetish doll | bound by design’, the artistic intent and process behind which I describe below.

🚨🇯🇵48HR TOKYO OPEN CALL🇯🇵🚨
😍🗼😵‍💫GLITCH ARTWORK😵‍💫🗼😍

🚨BAD GLITCHES ONLY REDUX🚨
Featuring all previous artists, plus whoever we fall in love with here.

🇯🇵❤️🥳📍🗼🇯🇵
TOKYO LOCATION:
NOX GALLERY
THE 1ST NFT GALLERY IN JAPAN

🥳OUR NEW SISTER GALLERY IN TOKYO🥳

EXHIBITION… pic.twitter.com/EdM19Agefy

— SuperchiefGalleryNFT (@SuperchiefNFT) August 2, 2023

Title

‘fetish doll | bound by design’

Artistic intent

The digital era has brought forth an unsettling paradox; we are at once more visible and more objectified, more celebrated, and more commodified. My new work ‘fetish doll | bound by design’ seeks to critically engage with an evolving cultural narrative about the representation of women, fetishism and the concept of consent.

At the heart of the narrative is Barbie, a figure both iconic and contentious. The recent Barbie movie was heralded as a celebration of agency, autonomy and diversity. It explores the concept that identity should not be shackled by societal expectations, that Barbie's - and by extension, any woman's - worth should not be determined by her physical attributes alone.

However, the movie also served as a stark reminder of the uncomfortable realities that persist. It laid bare Barbie's unrealistic proportions, sexualization and commodification, posing challenging questions about society's relationship with femininity. I sought to embody these aspects of the Barbie mythos in this artwork, where a fetish-dressed Barbie bust sitting in a display box on a shelf is a metaphor for how we package and prescribe femininity.

In ‘fetish doll | bound by design’, I draw on the visual language of fetishism not to sensationalize, but to challenge. I seek to confront the audience with the jarring reality of how our society can fetishize even the most innocent and formative aspects of a woman's life, while ignoring the critical importance of consent. The piece seeks to underscore that consent is not implied, but an ongoing dialogue, a process that demands respect and understanding.

The AI-rendered glitch animation medium presents a poignant metaphor for the distortions we confront in our self-image, challenging the viewer to reflect upon the biases of technology, trained on vast, unconsented datasets, and how their fingerprints can unknowingly shape our societal constructs, a theme I sought to integrate into the glitch aesthetic of the piece.

Importantly, ‘fetish doll | bound by design’ does not aim to pass judgment on the fetish community or those who find empowerment in it. It is grounded by an understanding of the intersectionality of fetish art and sex work. Sex work is real, hard work, and sex workers deserve full acceptance and inclusion in society, as do fetish artists. Instead, it focuses on critiquing society's fetishistic gaze upon the female form, where women are rendered as objects of consumption. 

In summary, this piece is a plea for introspection, a call for a reevaluation of our norms, and a challenge to our preconceptions. With it, I seek to spark discourse on femininity, societal beauty standards, the concept of consent, and the intersection of these themes in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Process

I started my exploration of this theme in MidJourney using multiple iterations of text-to-image prompting to create an initial AI generated feminine fetish photo, which I upscaled in Topaz Photo AI and post-processed in Adobe Lightroom. 

I then blended that image in MJ with images found online of vintage Barbie dolls to create an AI-generated fetish Barbie doll, which I also upscaled and post-processed. 

Next, I blended images found online of an empty vintage Barbie box and black latex for a fetish Barbie box, which I then blended with the fetish Barbie doll and ran multiple iterations of the vary tool until I had a fetish Barbie doll wearing shiny black latex in a smooth, shiny black box. 

I purposefully used this convoluted initial process to distance my work from any non-consensual fetish art that might live in AI datasets. I again upscaled and post-processed this final image. 

The next step was to create the glitched video. First, I ran multiple iterations of image to video in RunwayML Gen2 using the final fetish doll image. I slightly trimmed the best video output to match my artistic vision then put it in DaVinci Resolve, where I made initial color corrections to the clip, adjusting elements like lift, gamma, gain, color boost, contrast, mid/detail, saturation, and lum mix. I exported the processed clip in a high-quality format to keep all the intricate details that came out in the color-grading process intact.

I then upscaled the clip using a custom preset in Topaz Video AI to maintain the maximum detail and color fidelity in the upscaled 4K footage. I put the upscaled video into Photomosh and applied a dozen or so different filters to achieve the subtle glitch look I wanted while transforming it from photorealistic to an almost 3D comic book vibe with a fingerprint aesthetic, again to distance the work even further from the possibility of non-consensual imagery in the underlying datasets. I re-imported this upscaled and glitched footage into a new DaVinci Resolve project for final video compilation and mixing, and added a reversed duplicate of the clip so that it ran forward and backward in a loop.

In this final stage, I redid the color grading to achieve the look I wanted for the glitched video and used a node tree to apply specific LUTs and film mattes, aiming for an old-school Kodak cinematic film vibe.

Finally, I rendered the finished project in two formats: a higher quality 4k version suitable for minting; and a 1080p version to share on social media. For each use case, I focused on striking a balance between maintaining quality and reducing file size for the best viewer experience. 

If you've read this far, kudos. Thanks for joining me on this journey of artistic exploration.