The project departs from the notion of the uncanny valley (Masahiro Mori, 1970): that zone of perceptual unease inhabited by what is almost human, not real enough, not artificial enough. Feona Attwood (The uncanny valley: Transformations of the body and debates about sexualization, 2015) shifts this category from the robot to the contemporary female body, showing how transformative techniques (surgery, filters, CGI, optimization regimes) produce media-bodies: bodies that are neither fully fabricated nor fully bound to fleshly life, occupying, as Meredith Jones puts it, a double place, at once horrific and generative of new ways of being (Jones, 2012). The faces gathered in the video (avatars, renders, dolls, filtered and degraded faces circulating on TikTok and Instagram) are exactly this: images that have outlived their real referent, simulacra in Baudrillard's sense, copies that survive and circulate without a body.
The second axis is transformation as a permanent condition. Meredith Jones calls always-becoming (2008a: 6) the regime of makeover culture, in which what matters is no longer the before/after but the endless process of improvement. The audio tracks running through the video document this regime from within: beauty as a full-time occupation, the body as an asset to be optimized, femininity as capital. Sexualization becomes here, quite literally, a form of female impersonation: real women imitating the fake and the inhuman, and becoming objects in the process (Levy, in Attwood 2015).
The editing takes on the logic of the feed as form: accumulation, replication, grid, scroll. The faces repeat obsessively (same lips, same jawline, same eyes), and this is precisely the point: on social platforms the beauty standard has compressed into a single model, replicated endlessly by filters, tutorials and algorithms that reward conformity, until living person, avatar and doll become indistinguishable. It is here that the monstrous figures crossing the video emerge: Attwood shows how female bodies judged too transformed (too plastic, too done, too explicit in performing femininity as masquerade) are perceived as improper hybrids, as monstrous simulations, zombie-bodies suspended between the living and the inanimate. The monstrous is not what deviates from the standard, but the standard itself carried to its consequences. The final collapse (the face corrupting, glitching, melting) brings to the surface the file-nature of these bodies: corruptible images, degrading data.
