Memories of the Meatself

Model Marina (@gmy7sld) looks nothing “like herself.” But ain’t that the point?

RUSSIAN DOLLS

We all live in (a) Simulation. No, not like a computer simulation called the Matrix in which we can bend the laws of physics and do balletic, slo-mo kung fu fighting. It’s more like when you drink mostly grape-flavored things and forget to even want grapes anymore. Or even more insidiously and subtly, it’s argued in terms of style, or aesthetic patterns, as when you coordinate a blue, pleated, checkered tennis skirt with a white blouse and style your hair in symmetrical pigtails. Everyone knows what you’re channeling; and depending on how deeply you commit to the look, you might even change your voice and general comportment to match the look you’re embodying.

Despite the fact that everyone around you obviously knows you’re not a schoolgirl, and certainly not a Japanese schoolgirl, that’s what you’re channeling, along with the many others who might be doing the same thing inside a huge trend. As ridiculous as this scenario sounds, such looks-as-sartorial-frames do inform the wearing of clothes that inform and focus entire modes of behavior, which explains why it’s fun to dress up, both in general, and as certain things.

Middle schooler and aspiring model Jenny (@jen._.ya1201) is actually a schoolgirl who could’ve just worn her ACTUAL school uniform, but where’s the fun in that?

In the Jenny example above, the picture itself is a simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation, and there are often multiple levels or layers of this, like a cake or an onion. The interesting thing here is that on the level of Jenny having styled herself that morning with a K-pop enhanced “school uniform” for the innocent and playful look that she wanted to portray to the camera that day, she decided to go with sartorial markers that signified the innocence of a schoolgirl, despite the fact that she could've easily worn her actual school girl uniform, which one actually equally denoted her innocent school girl status. However, the stylized form of the school girl uniform as popularized in K-pop music videos seems to match the situation much more, and this picture is one in which serendipity and aligned aesthetic choices were able to find one another.

The original concept was to go to a CGV movie theater and do what school kids often do when exams finish, which is go out and see a movie and do all the things that they were usually not allowed to do throughout the semester, specifically like seen films such as Jurassic World: Dominion. But as luck and fate would have it, the theaters were so packed that it would be difficult to do as I had planned, which would be to have her sit behind me while I occasionally shoot her from the front without a flash in natural light at something like ISO 50,000, as I captured her looking up at the flickering lights and excitedly eating her popcorn out of a CGV branded yellow and red bucket. The look inspiring this concept is also simulation, specifically of the well-known pictures of pop culture consumption in theaters from 1950s advertisements. But since the theater was so packed as the showings were so popular, it would have been realistically impossible to engage in that kind of free-for-all photography without angering other paying customers, so we decided to give up on that idea. However, since the typical Korean CGV movie theater is a multi-modal space packed with all kinds of different, engaging activities in which to shoot and to similarly convey a sense of fun and reckless non-studiousness for the Korean student, we decided to take advantage of the colorful stuffed animal claw machines inside a colorful video game arcade, which is itself somewhat of a retro concept in this era.

As the concept changed, suddenly jennies stylized school girl uniform seemed completely apropos for the simple new concept that I had envisioned, in which she would simply stand casually in front of a row of colorful arcade machines as I used a cheap, 1980s era flash on top of my camera, which also simulates the cheap, direct flash from small strobe units that were common on the cheap, plastic, point-and-shoot cameras of the 80s. I even made sure to decent her as a subject and forgo the proper flash trek for a photographer, which would be to place the subject in the direct center so as to prevent the harsh, direct reflection off of glass that makes the picture look quite everyday and amateurish. Since I wanted the image to look amateurish, in placing Jenny just off the center of the frame and a piece of glass in the direct center, against which the flash would send back a harsh reflection. That technique worked quite well, and in post production, I decided to over-simulate by adding a lot of the artificial film grain that's so many people in the digital age associate with the analog, despite the fact that even in the 1980s, most over-the-counter Kodak or Fujifilm is one could buy at the convenient store certainly didn't have this much visible grain and the common 200, 400, or even 800 ISO ranges. But that's what people think of film photography looked like, so making a an aesthetic nod in that direction makes the image look more "retro" or "real." The effect is really enhanced by utilizing a third-party filter set called Exposure X7, which contains a preset which is quite uncannily convincing at simulating the color space of old Kodacolor film, which would be the five-dollar film one would have bought at the 7-Eleven in 1985. In addition to the increased brightness towards the center of the frame caused by the small, cheap flash, everything looks just right. But of course, some key things are out of place: namely, the K-pop-inspired schoolgirl uniform in the 1980s, not to mention the anachronistic elements such as single gameplay prices being KRW 1000 for the mini screen inside the pinball machine console. But these anachronisms on enough to break the illusion, especially if the illusion is pleasant and desired. It looks right enough, and the simulation is fairly successful, making this a picture more likely to be liked on Instagram. But the idea of a K-pop simulation of schoolgirl dress that is worn by an actual schoolgirl who wants to look even more coquettishly and cutely school girlish by wearing the thing that simulates what she actually is, all within an environment that itself seems somewhat out of the present time, as marked by certain photographic and post-production aesthetic alteration techniques — shows us that quite a minute is going on within this single frame.

Were both Marina and I unconsciously channeling WWII-era nose-art here, even as we attempted to simulate 1990s-era heroin chic?

Photo credit: The American Air Museum in Britain.

Was this on our minds? Photo credit: Juxtapoz — Art and Culture.

…in progress…

On Artifice

The artifice that most people find the most odious these days, in the era of the digital shift, remains the most obvious, the one that’s easy to see as it doesn’t show all thee hidden, forgotten labor it took to make the final product. We like to bemoan “Photoshop” but choose to completely forget about the basics which include things such as great makeup skills and good photography, even before getting to the digital artistry of “Photoshop.”

Marina is (mostly) bare-faced and in her (mostly) natural Meatstate.

With the highly skilled application of around 40 minutes of makeup (and eyelashes), her face becomes another entity altogether.

This seemingly simple shot masks a lot of hidden beauty/modeling habitus that mix with technical points to make the picture: First is that one needs heavy makeup such as this to do aggressively strong flash work. Second is that one needs a flash to capture and freeze the instant so cleanly (I’d estimate the actual exposure time of a flash pop like this to be ~1/10,000 of a second) and the flash allows (requires, actually) a larger f-stop, which increases depth-of-field, or the amount of her face/background that’s in tack-sharp focus, before even getting to the $1000 16–35 4.0L lens on a $2000 Canon 6d MKII camera. And that’s before pointing out that it’s fairly hard to whip one’s hair around like this but not display visible strain on one’s face.

And this leads us to the semi final image, after getting into good poses and deciding to shoot with the idea that she was going to be slightly over-exposed in post-production editing (which is where most of the overexposure blowout effect comes from).

In a Photoshop filter set called Exposure X7 that simulates film color spaces and textures, I used the Technicolor and the Bleach Bypass looks in combination to blow out the model to simulate the somewhat haphazard and technically flawed flash work of paparazzi shooters.

These are the many skills, Aesthetic choices, and fortuitous accidents that come together in something like a magazine cover, and is actually where Photoshop skills come to the four, even if you're not altering a models body shape or facial features.

And before we even get to the digital, we should consider all of the Meatself-preparation (body techniques) that goes into preparing for a shoot that might last all of 30 minutes that is the beginning of a process of snowballing artifice that does not much resemble the “true”, original Self. (Screenshot from here)

Your Meat Is Just the Beginning of You

All this is a roundabout way to say that the "original" self that you think you are is no longer the primary one that you think to find the “real you.” Scholar Russell Belk started talking about this well before social media and well well before even the popular Internet and called this the "extended self.” We don't even have to get into this in terms of electrons and transmitted messages, because our notion of self extends into the things we buy and the things we own. The example he famously gave in his article on the subject had to do with how you feel when your house burns down. Most people who suffer this kind of catastrophe feel gutted inside, as if a literal part of themselves had died. You lose precious belongings that had particular and peculiar meanings to you, many of which were unique and irreplaceable, like the last existing picture of your grandpa and grandma sitting on their porch in 1927 and things like that. But it doesn't have to be just things like your first come book you ever bought or your third grade report card. It's also things that have actual monetary and social value. That might be your designer handbag, expensive camera, or a beautiful designer jacket. All of these things are extensions of who we are, are expressions of our personalities, are public statements of our affiliations that all go together to define our greater self. So when your house burns down, so too, does a part of you get destroyed. This is pretty easy to understand.

But this is also why it's traumatic to lose access to your Instagram account, or to be temporarily barred from access to Facebook. Many people report this experience to be extremely upsetting, as an experience of feeling socially stunted or even hemmed in. It's no wonder that many people call this social limbo “Facebook jail.”

… in progress …

Residual Self-Image

“Is it really so hard to believe? Your clothes are different. The plugs in your arms and head are gone. Your hair has changed. Your appearance now is what we call residual self image. It is the mental projection of your digital self….What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

This quote and turn of phrase has always bothered me a bit, because I think the way it works is actually in the matrix of a story, neo is making a mental projection of his imagined. It's sort of like the fact that although I'm actually 50 years old, my mental self image isn't necessarily that of what I am imagine a 50 year old to be. It also reminds me of the time that my RSI started to drift away from what I saw in the mirror every day. Back when I was around in my early 20s and living for two years on Jeju Island, which is a small, semi-tropical island of the southern coast of the Korean peninsula, I was surrounded by only Korean people 100% of the time. And since the majority of people around me and my sense of sociology was determined by Korean faces, I started to forget what I myself looked like, until one day when I had happened to pass by a mirror for the first time in quite a while, I caught a sudden and unexpected glimpse of myself, which was different than when you use the mirror in the morning to brush your teeth or wash your face. As I saw myself as a passersby and wasn't expecting a mirror moment, I was surprised to see an apparent foreigner standing before me and it took me a moment to realize that this was me and that I was physically distant from the people around me. What I learned was that, without being reminded constantly, it's possible to forget what you look like. If one goes for stretch without accidentally seeing yourself affected in a crowd, it's easy to forget that you stand out from that crowd and your self image is constantly partially constituted by the people amongst whom you find yourself. But similarly, I believe that in the digital age, in which our appearances and our constant looks in the figurative mirror are mediated through screens, it's easy to start believing you look like your "digital self" and this defines the parameters of your “mental projection” of the self. The problem I have with that Turner phrase in the matrix is that in the late 1990s, I don't feel that people were sufficiently bombarded with representations of their digital selves through screens enough to form a new mental image of themselves. Just turn the phrase actually didn't make a lot of sense in the pre-social media age. I mean, there was MySpace of course, but I think the behemoth that is now Instagram and Facebook, both of which are defined by pictures as their semiotic currency, fit with that phrase nowadays.