Bored with the hyper-idealised and heteronormative world of images on social media, new forms of digital body identities are emerging. The interest is now no longer in conforming to a single, pre-set body ideal, but rather experimenting with the limits of one's own body. A new aesthetic is emerging that is characterised by extraordinary and irritating creatures. Exaggeration, transgression, inversion and transformation are strategies used to create new identity designs that lie beyond the normative body image.
The visual anthology Bizarre Bodies gathers, locates and conveys novel body identities from face-mutation to torso-transformation. With text, video and images, this website offers a first-ever selection on the theme of Digital Shapes and Identites. Bizarre Bodies inspires, intrigues and makes grotesque body and identity designs comprehensible to outsiders.
You can read more about the theoretical background of this internet phenomenon in my article for the Changing Cultures Magazine of the strategy boutique Sturm und Drang. ︎
