The Body: From Virtual Avatar to Plastic Surgery

From Photoshop to plastic surgery there lies a transaction of reality from the virtual to the actual; from digital image manipulation to physical body sculpting, a distance for explosion. What imploded in the virtual in the form of fantasy has now returned in the form of violent corporal mutation. This is a commodification of the human body, the plastic body as such, is the perfect body that everybody achieved with Photoshop and other image manipulation software in virtual reality and that has reached the physiological body with the augmentation tools of medical technologies, The human body is now reproduced following a set of standards, measurements and beauty references to fit under one of the pre-set categories dictated by the mass culture. The result of this computed type of production is an unprecedented uniformity. Everybody looks like everybody now, in actual reality there is a set of categories that each group of people fits in exactingly. This capitalist culture industry of mass production is still triumphant today but with new, more powerful, technologies of augmentation that are employed to facilitate this corporal metamorphosis. This implies that something went wrong in the use of new technologies. Today the production of sameness is more then ever locking us towards a catastrophic image of mass-produced disfigured bodies where violence persists as the main patent of post virtual-reality image.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Hassan Choubassi

Sahar Sharara

Conference

Publication date: June 2019

Publication date (Print): June 2019

Pages: 126-130

Affiliations

[0001]The International University of Beirut

Michel Abi Chahla street, Mousytbeh

Beirut-Lebanon

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM19.20

SO-VID: 86fd7728-0cf1-494a-922a-78f746814cae

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Politics of the Machine Beirut 2019

Conference acronym: POM2019

Conference number: 2

Conference location: Beirut, Lebanon

Conference date: 11-14 June 2019

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Politics of the Machine

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM19.20

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

BBC News 2007 Nip’n’tuck loans offer in Lebanon [WWW Document] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6577497.stm
W. BenjaminH. Arendt 1999 Illuminations Pimlico, London
G.L. Bon 2013 The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
G. DeleuzeF. Guattari 1987 A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis.
First National Bank [WWW Document] n.d. FNB’s Plast. Surg. Loan Beauty Is No Longer Lux http://www.fnb.com.lb/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25&Itemid=37
M. HorkheimerT.W. Adorno 2007 Dialectic of Enlightenment 1 Stanford University Press
B. Khbeiz 2003 Globalization and the Manufacture of Transient Events The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts Ashkal Alwan Beirut
Orlan n.d. The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] BBC News 2007 Nip’n’tuck loans offer in Lebanon [WWW Document] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6577497.stm

[2] W. BenjaminH. Arendt 1999 Illuminations Pimlico, London

[3] G.L. Bon 2013 The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

[4] G. DeleuzeF. Guattari 1987 A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis.

[5] First National Bank [WWW Document] n.d. FNB’s Plast. Surg. Loan Beauty Is No Longer Lux http://www.fnb.com.lb/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25&Itemid=37

[6] M. HorkheimerT.W. Adorno 2007 Dialectic of Enlightenment 1 Stanford University Press

[7] B. Khbeiz 2003 Globalization and the Manufacture of Transient Events The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts Ashkal Alwan Beirut

[8] Orlan n.d. The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan