My Body is a Surreal Machine

In the era of datasets and deepfakes, the female form is no longer just observed—it’s constructed, iterated, perfected, overexposed. Beauty becomes a training objective. Every pixel shaped by invisible hands and biased systems. The machine doesn’t just dream of women - it defines them. Compresses them. Smooths them out. This is where the friction lives: between skin and screen, biology and code. My body is a surreal machine resists this pressure by letting the cracks show. The body doesn’t comply. It twitches, loops, glitches. It tries to hold onto something soft and real in a system that keeps demanding more. This is not a breakdown. It’s a refusal. ----- Ivona Tau (2025) Lomography, GAN, Stable Diffusion, Dreambooth, Python This work was nominated as one of the 10 finalists for the ABS Digital Art Prize.