With the rise of the use of personal digital devices for our daily life, we’ve fostered a new relationship with such body extensions and the aesthetics behind them. Just like Marshall McLuhan noted more than 50 years ago: “The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.” (McLuhan 1964), we can see how this is applicable for several different gadgets nowadays. From the obvious choices such as smartphones and laptops, to the less evident such as drones and routers, Pink Party by Sandrine Deumier is an exploration of the digital body as an empty vessel which is able to rethink, reshape and restructure the way in which we relate to our very own digital aesthetics.
Within this video series, there’s a clear approach to the notion of master and servant embodied by humanoid figures which perform a series of tasks that represent, both literally and metaphorically, our exchanges within the digital realm. It is also interesting to point out the narratives in which such videos are imbedded. Sweet Zombie and the current obsession with wellness and body fitness; Verified Realities and the need for seizing the moment through images, videos and posts; Uncanny Ability and the illusion of being able to perform impossible tasks; Deep Learning and the invisible vulnerability of technology and its parts; Sustainable Goals and the need for an eternal upgrade which isn’t necessarily useful but it’s certainly appealing; Fatale Issue and the blind adoration of new digital idols which may or may not be what we think they are; and Storage Room and the accumulative compulsion of feeding our personalised algorithms beyond self-recognition. All of these evoke a bizarre mythology of what we experience while going to and from our digital selves and into the totality of what we are.
In that sense, Pink Party becomes a visual approach to the new and still unexplored paths through which we communicate and translate who we are and who we aim to be, into the collective consciousness of digital interactions. It also becomes a critique of the blind faith we’ve built around the digital devices that are now part of our everydayness and through which we’ve woven a web of affective links that has allowed us to create our new selves. Pink Party is a series of symptoms that needed to be embodied in order to be understood.
