Abstract
This paper introduces the concept of digital skin to examine how skin is visually represented, modified, and circulated in contemporary media culture. Across diverse media platforms, skin becomes a surface of aesthetic legibility and affective regulation; no longer organic or tactile, but smooth, optimised, and flattened for visibility and, ultimately, extraction. In this regime, digital skin is a media-material condition: a surface interface that reflects the politics of individualisation, subjectivation, cultural representation, recognition, and control. Building on feminist theory, media phenomenology, and psychoanalytic thought, I argue that digital skin functions as a site of mediated subjectivation, where the skin itself is calibrated for participation in dominant visual economies. Within this context, facialisation operates as a mechanism of the symbolic order, determining what becomes legible, what is excluded, and what forms of bodily presence are visually registered. In this process, digital skin becomes a visual threshold through which subjectivity is encoded, aestheticised, and made extractable. This paper critiques the cultural logic of digital skin as a visual economy that extracts from the psychopolitical field of subjectivation and displaces the intercorporeal dimensions of being, reducing the body to an image optimised for legibility, surveillance, and aesthetic coherence. It argues that digital skin reconfigures the relationship between image and selfhood, contributing to new forms of mediated identity shaped by algorithmic visibility, aesthetic labour, and the demands of algorithmic capitalism. At stake is not only how we see ourselves, but how the body is made knowable, governable, and exchangeable through visual regimes of power.
Presenters
Ophir AmitayStudent, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University for the Creative Arts, London, City of, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Visual Culture, Subjectivity, Embodiment, Algorithmic Capitalism, Aesthetic Labour, Facialisation
