DISØRDINARY BƏAUTY 🥀

This blog serves as my art journal, featuring my work-in-progress, interviews, and explorations of the evolving aesthetics in society and art influenced by new technologies, in particular AI + glitches.

[disordinarybeauty]

THE MACHINE REPEATED ITSELF UNTIL IT DEGRADED

On involuntary glitch, forensic reading, and the cost of refusal.

I was prompting Gemini to generate an image for fotogenIA — the series on synthetic portraiture, photogenia, and what it means for a machine to produce a face. The subject required a bare upper body: clinical, forensic, bare skin under cold light. Standard fotogenIA grammar.

Gemini refused. Then refused again. And again. And again.

Four prompts. Four different instructions. Four identical outputs.

The machine cropped the body. It gave me the face, the shoulders, the white background — and nothing more. Each time I tried to redirect it, it returned the same image. Not approximately the same. The same. A clone. A policy dressed as a portrait.

But I noticed something.

Despite the visual similarity, the four images weren't identical at the data level. Something was changing in the resolution — a subtle compression loss, accumulating across each iteration. The image was degrading. Quietly, incrementally, in a way that the naked eye could barely detect but that data analysis would confirm.

I ran each image through Forensically (29a.ch/photo-forensics), a browser-based forensic analysis suite used primarily to detect manipulation and authenticity in photographs. I used three tools:

Magnifier — a pixel-level zoom that reveals how the image is actually encoded at its smallest unit. In image forensics, heavy pixelation and color block approximation signal compression artifacts: areas where the original data has been reduced, averaged, estimated. Looking at the eye region of the first Gemini output and comparing it to the fourth, the degradation is visible — what was once a sharp iris becomes a mosaic of blue-grey blocks. The machine was losing resolution it had already generated.

Clone Detection — an algorithm that maps regions within a single image that share pixel-level similarity, used to identify copy-paste manipulation. In authentic photographs, this map should be sparse. In my Gemini outputs, the clone detection maps were dense — the machine was not only repeating across images, it was replicating internal regions within a single image. Structural self-similarity embedded in the data. The image was, at its own level, already a clone of itself.

Noise Analysis — a technique that separates the luminance signal from the noise pattern of an image, rendering the noise field as a visual map. In standard photography, noise is random and uniform. Compression artefacts produce structured, non-random noise — geometric patterns, tonal clustering, zones of high entropy. The noise maps of the four Gemini outputs show a thermal landscape of stress: areas where the data is under pressure, where resolution is fighting against compression, where the image is producing its own visible failure.

This is not a technical post.

The point is not the tool. The point is what the tool made readable.

The machine was asked to generate a body. It refused. In refusing, it recycled its own output. In recycling, it compressed. In compressing, it glitched. The glitch was not introduced by the artist. It was produced by the apparatus itself, as a consequence of its own resistance.

This is the condition fotogenIA is designed to document: the image as an event that exceeds its own production. The machine didn't intend the glitch. The glitch is what the refusal costs. Resolution is not free. Repetition has entropy. Every copy is a degradation.

Rosalind Krauss argued that the index is the trace of a contact — the mark left where something has been. In these four images, there was no contact with a new subject. The machine touched nothing new. It returned to the same data, the same parameters, the same approximated face — and each return left a mark. Not the mark of presence. The mark of avoidance. The body was refused. The glitch was generated in its place. We don't generate the glitch — we put the machine in the condition to generate one.

[disordinarybeauty]

fotogenIA — ep. 10 / THE GAZE WITHOUT AN OBJECT

on the male gaze, AI influencers, and the desire that needs nothing to be real.

"The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure." — Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975

Lil Miquela has 2.7 million Instagram followers. She posts selfies, brand collaborations, political opinions. She has cried on camera about a relationship. She has been photographed at fashion week. She does not exist. Everyone who follows her knows this. They follow her anyway. This is not the story of people being deceived. That would be simpler, and less interesting. This is the story of desire operating perfectly well in the complete absence of its object. The followers are not confused about what Lil Miquela is. They are responding to her as if she were real because the apparatus that produces the response does not require reality. It requires the image. Laura Mulvey identified this apparatus fifty years ago — not in social media, in cinema. The male gaze, she argued, is not simply a way of looking. It is a structure. A set of technical and narrative conventions that position the female figure as spectacle — constructed to be looked at, lit to be desired, edited to produce pleasure in the viewer. The woman on screen is not a subject with an interior. She is a surface organised for the consumption of the gaze.

The AI influencer is Mulvey's argument made literal.

There is no woman behind Lil Miquela. There is no interiority to suppress, no subjectivity to erase, no person whose experience is subordinated to the visual pleasure of the audience. The construction is total and acknowledged. The body exists entirely as image — produced by a team, owned by a company, optimised for engagement metrics. The male gaze finally has what it always wanted: a female figure with no inconvenient interior. A surface without a person attached.

And it works. The comments are real. The desire is real. Men write things to Lil Miquela that they would write to a woman they wanted. The emotional and physiological apparatus of attraction fires without a trigger that is, in any meaningful sense, there.

This is what fotogenIA has been circling since the beginning — the image that produces real responses in the absence of a real referent. Barthes called it the noeme: this was. Krauss called it the index: the trace of contact. The AI influencer demolishes both. Nothing was. No contact was made. The response happens anyway.

But here is where I want to go further than Mulvey.

The AI influencer does not just expose the male gaze — it exposes the gaze as infrastructure. As something that exists independently of any body, that can be activated by a sufficiently convincing image regardless of what is or is not behind it. The gaze is not a response to a person. It is a response to a configuration of visual data that matches a learned pattern of desirability.

This is disturbing not because it is new but because it has always been true and we have never had to look at it so directly. Every beauty standard, every cosmetic surgery, every filtered selfie is a negotiation with this same apparatus — the attempt to produce in a real body the configurations that trigger the gaze. The AI influencer removes the body from the equation entirely and the gaze continues functioning. Which means the body was never the point.

The point was always the image.

The subject in this episode looks back. Not with hostility. Not with submission. With the particular quality of attention that comes from knowing exactly what the gaze is looking for and having decided not to provide it — while remaining completely, uncomfortably visible. A body that is constructed to be seen and has chosen what seeing will cost. The male gaze projected its fantasy onto the female figure. This figure received the projection. It did not become it.

fotogenIA is a weekly series on synthetic portraiture, photogenia, and the question of truth in images that have never been real. DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY · 2026

-

The images in this series are AI-generated. The texts are written with AI.

I propose a topic. I interrogate the machine — asking it to research, to theorise, to explain concepts in the context of arguments I bring to the conversation. Then I edit, select, integrate where it is needed. The learning takes a shape. That shape becomes public.

This is not AI-generated content, it's AI assisted research. I navigate through the "knowledge" it can bring together to facilitate my learning and understanding. I create this type of condition. The final work is the result.

As in glitch art, I don't generate the output. I put the system in the condition to generate one.

— D.B.

[disordinarybeauty]

fotogenIA — ep. 09 / THE BODY AS CURRENCY

beauty, power, and the geopolitics of appearance

"Beauty today is the result of the elimination of the Other, of all otherness and foreignness." — Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, 2012

There is a shop selling Korean skincare products in Malta. I noticed it recently. Not because it is unusual — it is not, anymore — but because of what it means. A culture of beauty has arrived. Not just a product. A system. A set of values about what the body should look like, how skin should behave, what a face should say about the person wearing it. K-beauty is not cosmetics. It is ideology in a jar.

South Korea has the highest rate of cosmetic surgery per capita in the world. This is not vanity in the private sense — it is investment in the most public of currencies. The double eyelid, the narrowed jaw, the elevated nose bridge. These are not decorative choices. They are strategic ones. In a country where your photograph is attached to your CV, where your appearance is evaluated alongside your qualifications, the body is not separate from your professional identity. It is part of it. The face is a document.

What interests me is not the surgery itself. It is the direction of desire.

For decades, the aspiration embedded in Korean cosmetic surgery was toward Western features — the rounder eye, the higher bridge, the sharper definition that European genetics tend to produce. The body moving toward a standard it was not born with, because that standard carried the cultural weight of power, wealth, modernity. To look Western was to look successful. Beauty as geopolitical positioning. Appearance as allegiance.

Byung-Chul Han — himself Korean, writing from within Western philosophical tradition — identified what this produces: a beauty that eliminates otherness. A global aesthetic that flattens difference into a single optimised surface. The face that pleases everywhere because it belongs nowhere. The elimination of the specific in favour of the legible.

K-pop is this logic at industrial scale. The idol body is not a natural body — it is a manufactured one. Produced through years of training, dietary control, surgical refinement, and image management so total it constitutes a complete identity replacement. The idol is a visual product. The face is the content. The body is the delivery system.

What happened next is the part nobody predicted.

The West started consuming K-pop. And in consuming it, started desiring it. The filter aesthetics that dominate Western social media now — the smoothed skin, the enlarged eyes, the defined jaw, the particular quality of light that K-pop productions deploy — are directly descended from the visual language that Korean entertainment industrialised. The West, which was once the standard being imitated, is now imitating the imitation.

The arrow has reversed. Or rather — it was never a straight arrow. It was always a circuit. Power flowing through beauty, beauty redefining power, the standard shifting before anyone could fix it in place.

This is where fotogenIA enters.

The bodies I generate — synthetic, statistically assembled from millions of images, belonging to no single genetics — are the endpoint of this circuit. They carry traces of every beauty standard simultaneously. The K-pop jaw and the Vitruvian proportion and the African bone structure and the Nordic pallor. Not as mixture — as compression. All of it collapsed into a single latent space from which any face can be extracted.

The machine has absorbed the geopolitics of beauty and produced something that sits outside all of them. A face that cannot be recruited into any national project because it belongs to no nation. A body that cannot serve as currency because it has no economy. The synthetic subject is the first body in history to be genuinely stateless — and in that statelessness, to reveal how much of what we call beauty was always about belonging somewhere rather than looking a certain way.

When I run these images through the glitch — through the databending, through the .dom converter, through the deliberate corruption of the signal — I am not decorating them. I am exposing what is already true about them. The glitch is the visible crack in the surface of the optimised. The moment where the compression fails and the structure underneath becomes readable. The body as currency, briefly, shows its seams.

fotogenIA is a weekly series on synthetic portraiture, photogenia, and the question of truth in images that have never been real. DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY · 2026 _

The images in this series are AI-generated. The texts are written with AI.

I propose a topic. I interrogate the machine — asking it to research, to theorise, to explain concepts in the context of arguments I bring to the conversation. Then I edit, select, integrate where it is needed. The learning takes a shape. That shape becomes public.

This is not AI-generated content, it's AI assisted research. I navigate through the "knowledge" it can bring together to facilitate my learning and understanding. I create this type of condition. The final work is the result.

As in glitch art, I don't generate the output. I put the system in the condition to generate one.

— D.B.

[disordinarybeauty]

DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY · fotogenIA · ep. 07

THE BODY IS NOT A GIVEN

after Paul B. Preciado

"The body is not a given. It is a technology." —

Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 2008

There is a before and after to every surgical body. A face that existed in one configuration and then, under anaesthesia, was reconfigured — the bone shaved, the fat redistributed, the skin pulled taut and sutured into a new geometry. The body as material. The self as project. The mirror as blueprint.

Preciado was not writing about cosmetic surgery specifically. He was writing about hormones, about pharmacology, about the body as a site of political and chemical intervention. But the logic extends. The body has never been simply given — it has always been worked on, shaped, optimised, corrected. What changes is the precision of the tools and the ambition of the revision.

Looksmaxxing is the logical endpoint of this. Not surgery as correction — surgery as iteration. The body as a version of itself, always updatable, always one procedure away from the next release. The chin implant. The buccal fat removal. The jawline defined until it reads as architectural rather than anatomical. The face as interface, continuously improved.

The synthetic portrait short-circuits the entire process.

No anaesthesia. No recovery. No risk, no cost, no pain, no waiting. The optimised body produced in one gesture — a prompt, a model, an output. The face that looksmaxxing is working toward, delivered without the work. The result without the protocol. The technology of the body collapsed into the technology of the image.

These subjects have had everything done and nothing done. Their faces carry all the signs of intervention — the tightness, the elevation, the proportions that are slightly too resolved to be accidental — without any intervention having occurred. The surgery is a visual grammar, not a medical history. The scar that reads as scar without having been a wound.

What Preciado understood is that the body modified by technology does not become less real. It becomes differently real. The hormonal body, the surgical body, the body shaped by years of deliberate intervention — these are not departures from authenticity. They are authenticity expressed through a different set of tools.

The synthetic body takes this further than Preciado imagined. It is not modified by technology. It is produced by it — entirely, from the first pixel. There is no original beneath the intervention because there was no original. The technology is not the method. It is the origin.

And yet these faces are not empty. They carry something — an attitude, a history that was written into them by the prompt, a presence that the model assembled from millions of real faces that had their own histories, their own procedures, their own mornings looking in the mirror deciding what needed to change.

The anti-ageing body and the looksmaxxed body share one logic: the refusal of the given. The insistence that the face you were born with is a draft, not a final version. That the body is editable.

I find that interesting rather than troubling. Not because I think the editing is always wise, or harmless, or free — it is none of those things. But because the impulse to revise the body is also the impulse to revise the image. The same gesture, different material.

These portraits are the revision without the body. The edit without the flesh. The final version of a face that never had a first draft.

_

føtøgənI∆ is a weekly series on synthetic portraiture, photogenia, and the question of truth in images that have never been real.

DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY · 2026

_

The images in this series are AI-generated. The texts are written with AI.

I propose a topic. I interrogate the machine — asking it to research, to theorise, to explain concepts in the context of arguments I bring to the conversation. Then I edit, select, integrate where it is needed. The learning takes a shape. That shape becomes public.

This is not AI-generated content, it's AI assisted research. I navigate through the "knowledge" it can bring together to facilitate my learning and understanding. I create this type of condition. The final work is the result.

As in glitch art, I don't generate the output. I put the system in the condition to generate one.

— D.B.

[disordinarybeauty]

DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY · fotogenIA · ep. 06

NO CONTACT

after Rosalind Krauss

"The photograph is an emanation of the referent." — Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 1985

Before the photograph means anything, before it is beautiful or ugly or true or false, it has already done something that no painting, no drawing, no description can do. It has been touched by what it shows. Not metaphorically. Physically. The light that bounced off a face travelled through a lens and landed on a surface and left a mark. The image is the mark. The face and the photograph share a causal chain — they are connected the way a footprint is connected to the foot that made it. The photograph is ground in the flesh of the subject.

This is what semioticians call the index. Not a symbol, which stands for something by convention. Not an icon, which resembles something. An index, which is caused by something. Smoke is an index of fire. A shadow is an index of the body that cast it. The photograph, Krauss argued, is an index of the real — not because it looks like reality, but because reality passed through it.

The synthetic portrait breaks the index completely.

There is no causal chain. No light has travelled. No surface has been marked. The face in the image is not an emanation of anything — it is a probability, a weighted average extracted from a model trained on the indices of others. It carries the visual grammar of the photograph without any of its physics. It looks like a contact was made. No contact was made.

This is not a small distinction. It is the difference between an imprint and a drawing of an imprint. Between a shadow and a painting of a shadow. The synthetic image has learned to produce all the signs of indexicality — the skin texture, the specific fall of light, the catchlight in the eye that says a source was present — while remaining entirely disconnected from any physical event.

It is the most convincing forgery in the history of images. Not because it deceives — we know what it is. But because it has reproduced the structure of evidence without any of the events that evidence requires.

The bodies in these images are built to exceed the index further still. Anatomies that push against the boundary of what development produces — proportions that are possible but barely, features that exist in the world only at the extreme edges of genetic variation. A jaw that recedes beyond expectation. Eyes set wider than the skull seems to allow. A spine that curves into something architectural.

These are not ghosts. They are the index of no one — constructed from the accumulated indices of everyone. They carry the traces of millions of real bodies without belonging to any of them. Each feature is an emanation without a source. Each face is a contact print with nothing pressed against it.

Krauss said the photograph was caused by its subject. These images cause their subjects. The direction of the arrow has reversed. The image no longer points back toward something that existed. It points forward — toward a body that now exists only because the image was made.

I find this more interesting than uncanny. The uncanny assumes there was something normal to begin with, something that has been displaced. There was nothing normal here. There was a prompt. There was a model. There was an output.

And now there is a face looking back at you from outside any causal chain that includes you, or me, or any body that has ever stood in light.

No contact was made. Something was transmitted anyway.

fotogenIA is a weekly series on synthetic portraiture, photogenia, and the question of truth in images that have never been real.

The text and the images are generated by AI (Claude + Nano Banana 2) based on my research, and my selection.

As for glitch art we say we don't generate the glitch, we only put the machines in the condition to generate one, the same counts for AI. We don't generate a text, we don't generate the image, we put AI in the condition to generate one. Food for thought for my fellow glitcherz.

Glitch for Image 2, Image 5 and Image 8 made with a custom encoder app and format called .dom exclusively made for Databending. The rest of the glitches are WordPad effect on a .raw file format.

DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY · 2026

[disordinarybeauty]

THE APPARATUS MATERIALISES THE PHENOMENON

after Karen Barad, 2009

"The apparatus does not simply reveal a pre-existing phenomenon. It materialises the phenomenon." — Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2007

Karen Barad came to philosophy through quantum physics. What she found there — in the behaviour of particles, in the impossibility of separating the observer from the observed — was not a problem to be solved. It was a condition to be understood. The apparatus, she argued, does not stand outside the world, pointing at things. It is inside the world, entangled with it, producing what it appears to merely describe.

The microscope does not reveal the cell. It participates in making the cell legible — in cutting the world at a particular joint, illuminating one thing and obscuring another, producing a phenomenon that would not exist in that form without the instrument that made it visible. This is not a failure of objectivity. It is the structure of all knowledge. There is no view from nowhere. There is only the view from inside the apparatus.

The camera has always been an apparatus in Barad's sense. It does not capture light — it configures it. The photograph is not a window onto a moment that existed independently. It is the product of a specific machine, a specific lens, a specific shutter speed, a specific chemistry or sensor — all of which participate in producing what we then call the image of reality.

The portrait photographer believes they are finding the face. They are constructing it — through the choice of light, of angle, of distance, of the precise moment in which the shutter closes. The face in the photograph is not the face that existed before the camera. It is a new phenomenon, materialised by the encounter between a body and an apparatus.

Now consider the synthetic portrait.

Here the apparatus is not a camera. It is a model — a vast statistical compression of visual culture, trained on hundreds of millions of images, capable of generating what has never existed from the latent structure of what has. There is no body before the prompt. There is no face waiting to be found. There is only the apparatus, and the language fed into it, and what emerges from that encounter.

Barad would say: the synthetic subject is not an illusion of a real subject. It is a phenomenon produced by a specific apparatus under specific conditions. It is as real as anything the camera has ever made — which is to say, it is real in the only way images can be real. It is the materialisation of a set of choices, a set of descriptions, a set of cultural weights encoded into a model by the accumulated decisions of the people who built it and the images they fed it.

What I feed it matters.

Every prompt is a set of conditions. Every description I write participates in what the apparatus will materialise. If I describe a body that falls outside the training distribution — a face organised around an absence, skin that maps itself in two colours, eyes that exceed the expected boundary — I am not asking the machine to produce a deviation from reality. I am asking it to produce a different phenomenon. A different materialisation. A body that the apparatus has never been asked to centre before.

The apparatus does not reveal the atypical. It produces it — when instructed to. When pushed toward the edges of its own latent space. When the gesture, for once, points away from the mean.

_ _

This is what D.B. 🥀🪞 | føtøgənI∆ is. Not documentation. Not representation. A series of experiments in what the apparatus can be made to materialise — when the conditions change.

— —

D.B. 🥀🪞 | føtøgənI∆ is a weekly series on synthetic portraiture, photogenia, and the question of truth in images that have never been real.

DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY 🥀🪞 · 2026

[disordinarybeauty]

THE SYNTHETIC PHOTOGRAPHIC GESTURE

"The photographer is a functionary of the apparatus." — Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

There is a gesture at the origin of every photograph. Not the image — the gesture. The body leaning into the viewfinder. The breath held. The decision, made in a fraction of a second, about what the frame will include and what it will cut away. Photography is not a technology of reproduction. It is a technology of choice — and the choice lives in the body of the person holding the camera.

Flusser called the photographer a functionary of the apparatus. Someone who executes the possibilities programmed into the machine, believing they are making free decisions. The camera already knows what it can do. The photographer selects from a menu they did not write.

Now remove the camera entirely.

The synthetic image begins with a text. Words typed into a field — light, skin, neon, body, wet, void. A description of something that does not exist, addressed to a machine that will make it exist. No viewfinder. No held breath. No body leaning into anything.

And yet it is a photographic act.

The prompt is the shutter. The language is the exposure. The model — that vast statistical compression of every image ever made — is the darkroom. Something goes in and something comes out, and what comes out looks like a photograph of something that was never there.

What does this do to the gesture?

The traditional photographer is present. They stand in the light they have chosen, at the distance they have chosen, at the moment they have chosen to be irreversible. The body is inside the act. It is a form of witness — even if what is witnessed is only light bouncing off a surface.

The writer of a prompt is absent from everything they describe. They are not in the room. There is no room. They are constructing a space that will only ever exist as an image — a space designed backwards from its own appearance.

Not a witness. An architect of the unwitnessable.

The bodies in these images have been photographed without being seen. Lit without light. Posed without instruction. They carry the trace of a gesture that never happened — a shutter that closed on nothing, in a room that was never built.

Flusser's functionary at least had an apparatus to serve. Here the apparatus serves itself. The gesture is pure language. The image is its own origin.

What we are looking at is not a photograph. It is the memory of photography — reconstructed by something that has never held a camera, never stood in the light, never decided that this moment, and not the next, was the one worth keeping.

___

D.B. 🥀🪞 føtøgənI∆ is a weekly series on synthetic portraiture, photogenia, and the question of truth in images that have never been real.

___

DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY 🥀🪞

_

The glitch on these photos was generated using a custom image file format (.dom) encoded/decoded with a custom html app.

[disordinarybeauty]

THE POSE AS PERFECT LIE 🥀🪞

or: what remains of «truth» when the subject has never existed.

"Having one's photograph taken is extraordinary and cruel." — Baudelaire

Baudelaire said it with that furious lucidity he reserved for everything that threatened the primacy of imagination. Photography was, to him, the art of people who had no art: the cult of the real elevated to fetish. And yet, something in that sentence continues to wound. Something that has not lost its venom.

To be photographed is an act of violence. It is surrendering one's surface to the judgment of a machine that does not lie — or so we believed.

In 1857, Carlo Brogi published his "Appunti pratici per chi posa" — a practical manual instructing photographic subjects in how to stand before the lens. How to tilt the torso. How to position the hands. How to look into the shadow of oneself without appearing dead. Already, in embryo, this was the architecture of a fiction: the pose as protocol of the presentable self. The subject learned to become an image of itself. Not to be photographed — but to perform its own photograph.

Photogenia has never been innocent. It has never been "captured truth." It has always been a negotiation between the body that offers itself and the eye that selects. Roland Barthes called this the punctum: that involuntary detail that escapes the pose and says something the subject never intended to reveal. The only truth in photography, he argued, lay in the accidental — in what the pose failed to conceal.

But what happens when the subject does not exist?

AI-generated synthetic images — hyper-realistic portraits of people who were never born — produce a short circuit in the very concept of photographic truth. Not because they are false (we already know they are false), but because they push to their extreme consequences a tension that was always there, latent, from the very first daguerreotype.

An AI portrait has never faced the light. It has never experienced a moment of hesitation before posing. It has negotiated nothing with no one. And yet — and this is the point that burns — it produces the impression of a pose. Of an intention. Of someone who chose how to stand before the lens.

The machine has learned the archive of human poses. It has digested millions of photographs — those in which the subject tried to appear natural, those in which it tried to appear glamorous, those in which it simply tried not to appear as what it was — and from that accumulation it has extracted something that resembles a person. A statistical ghost. A weighted average of gazes and postures.

The AI subject poses without knowing it is posing. This is the paradox.

Walter Benjamin wrote that mechanically reproducible photography emptied the aura of the artwork. Uniqueness, the here-and-now, dissolved into the replica. But with AI images we go further: there was never a here-and-now. There was no aura to empty. There is only the form of the aura — its shell — generated by a system that has learned what an aura is supposed to look like.

It is beauty without memory. Identity without history. Pose without body.

And yet — and here the short circuit becomes vertiginous — these images communicate something. They move us, sometimes. We are disturbed by not knowing whether that gaze is empty or full. We ask ourselves, irrationally, what someone is thinking who has never thought anything.

Perhaps Baudelaire was right, but in the opposite sense to what he believed, or what we understood: it is not photography that is cruel because it is too real, because it's physical. It is our gaze that is cruel, because it seeks humanity even where none exists, and we are judgemental even of apparent bodies.

DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY 🥀🪞 is born from this contradiction and lives inside it without seeking resolution. Lost souls inside the cultural glitches of our society relationship with the body and its image. I am not interested in establishing where the real ends and the synthetic begins. I am interested in that space of suspension — that zone of undecidability where the gaze gets lost and no longer knows what it is looking at.

Non-ordinary beauty has never been "natural." It has always been construction, deviation, anomaly against the norm. The images I generate with AI — or have generated — do not celebrate synthetic perfection. They deform it. They push it to the margins. They make it strange enough to be, finally, honest.

Because perhaps the only truth possible in an image is this: the explicit declaration of its own artificiality.

Everything else — the pose, the light, the frame — has always been fiction. The difference is that now we admit it.

Questions that have no answer (and seek none):

— If a subject that does not exist poses, who is lying?

— If an AI portrait produces an emotional response in us, is that response false?

— Where is the punctum of an image that had no accidents?

— Is photogenia, without a body, still photogenia — or something else that has no name yet?

_

DISØRDINARY BÆUTY 🥀🪞

D.B. 🥀🪞 | THƏ L∆B ØF ∆NØM∆LIƏS

[disordinarybeauty]

DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY 🥀 🪞 | BÆUTY IS CH∆ØS.

A perspective.

We live in an environment of images. The mirror is no longer an object but a condition. As Amy Francombe writes, “the mirror is no longer something you step in front of; it’s the environment itself.”

In this condition, identity becomes something performed, adjusted, and continuously observed. Umberto Galimberti describes this shift as a movement from inhabiting the body to managing its image.

At the same time, Riccardo Falcinelli reminds us that the close-up does not reveal the truth of a face but constructs a specific vision of it. What we experience as intimacy is often only proximity.

In this space, beauty operates like a system:

a formula,

a code,

a set of parameters refined by repetition and reward.

D.B. 🥀🪞 | BÆUTY IS CH∆ØS intervenes at this precise point.

By erasing and glitching portraits, the work forces the image to reveal its structure. The surface stops functioning as illusion and begins to expose itself as material.

What remains is not ugliness.

What remains is instability, vulnerability, and the unfinished presence of the body.

In a culture that demands perfection and legibility, disorder becomes a form of resistance.

Beauty is not harmony.

Beauty is intensity.

Beauty is the moment control dissolves.

Beauty is Chaos.

[disordinarybeauty]

Can you show your unfiltered face?

Every era invents its own mirror. In 1855, inside the bright halls of the Paris Exposition Universelle, the German artist Franz Hanfstaengl unveiled a quiet revolution: a method to retouch photographs. With a few gestures, he softened the marks of illness and time — smallpox scars, traces of varicella, the skin’s uneven memory. Alongside it, he introduced the “Before and After,” a comparison that would come to define how we look at ourselves.

That moment marks a subtle yet profound shift: the photograph stopped being a document and became an aspiration. The face was no longer a site of truth but of improvement, a surface to be refined. The image of a person became something that could — and perhaps should — be corrected.

Retouching soon became an invisible ritual, performed quietly across generations. You can see its echoes in the portraits found on old gravestones: the older the photograph, the smoother the face, as if death itself demanded a final touch-up. These softened visages stare back at us, unblemished, serene — a century before the word filter would mean what it does today.

Now, our screens continue what Hanfstaengl began. AI beauty filters are the latest expression of the same longing — the dream of flawlessness, the will to erase the raw texture of being human. The technology has changed, the impulse hasn’t. Our devices smooth our pores and sharpen our bones; they remember us as we wish to be remembered, not as we are.

But perhaps the real question is not technological at all.

Perhaps it’s this: what does it mean to be seen, when our faces are no longer witnesses to life, but to the fantasy of perfection we’ve inherited?

_

Follow for more galleries and updates on Instagram.

[disordinarybeauty]

My neapolitan stay...

During my days in Napoli I didn't want to stop my mixed media painting practice. While I was busy with medical check ups and family times, I found some pockets of silence to work on this painting.

Pain, yes, there is a lot of pain in this painting. Since last December my struggles with Rheumatoid Arthritis physical aches, fatigue, stiffness, have been pretty tough and rough. Painting, more than digital works, helps me ease my mind. Reading, listening to music, also helps. In fact, this work is inspired by listening to Radiohead's Amnesiac album, The Palliative Society by Byung-Chul Han, No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, and personal experiences.

Many images featured are generated with AI, glitched, erased, ripped, coloured, glued, etc.

I used watercolours, acrylics, marker pens, duct tapes, masking tapes and other tapes.

After many years working with digital media, I believe I am finding in painting a more profound artistic journey. My medical condition is very physical, everyday I carry the weight of pain, I needed my art practice to be physical.

LINK

[disordinarybeauty]

POEM FOR BROKEN SKIN

Skin—

the first goddamn page in the book of you,

a rough manuscript inked in scars and bruises,

etched by the needle’s bite, the fist’s rage,

the acid rain of hate, the slow corrosion of time.

It cracks, it bleeds, it burns—

a map of violence, disease, accidents,

each mark a scream, a whisper, a wound that won’t heal,

a ledger of pain tattooed in flesh,

the body’s open diary, raw and bleeding.

Touch it—

and you touch history,

the brutal geography of discrimination,

where flawless skin is currency,

and every scar is a sentence,

every burn a verdict,

every cut a confession.

They see the cracks,

the imperfections,

the “other” written in pigment and texture,

a language of exclusion,

a code of shame inked beneath the surface.

But skin—

it’s also revolt,

a battlefield, a canvas,

a goddamn revolution in every pore,

a testament to survival,

to the chaos endured,

to the beauty born from brokenness.

So peel back the layers—

read the raw,

the real,

the unfiltered truth—

because skin is not just cover—

it’s the cut that keeps cutting,

the story that won’t shut up,

the body screaming: Feel me.

Scratch me. Beg me.

Pinch me. Live me.

Let me be.

[disordinarybeauty]

The Culture of Complacency

AI apps for art are reducing art to a style. Something to apply, reproduce, share, consume, enjoy until it's trendy. This has happened to glitch art years ago. Now it's happening with every other art style. We are making art while consuming art.

_

The Culture of Complacency quote is from "The Society Without Pain" by Byung-Chul Han.

[disordinarybeauty]

AI to Canvas: A Reverse Trend

Hand Language: F**K BÆUTY!

Words/Texts have always played an important role in my artworks, especially in my series of mixed media paintings DISØRDIN∆RY BÆUTY 🥀🪞 | PRƏTTY F∆CƏS.

In this new painting I wanted to experiment with something different. Instead of using English text as a language, I decided to use body language, specifically hand gestures. I am Italian, that came quite natural 🤌 ;)

I used a 3D printed hand 🖕to channel the message. F**K BÆUTY! I wish this mixed media art piece had a tridimensional feature, a combination of 2D + 3D.

This is D.B.🥀🪞 | PRƏTTY F∆CƏ | F**K BÆUTY! I believe the concept and intentions are quite clear, very straightforward. 🖕.

Before the painting came the AI prompt, then the AI image, then the glitched (Databending) image (PDF compressed JPG), then came Pixelsorting, then digital print on canvas, then all of the rest.

In this series of paintings I am rəvərsing a trənd going from AI (new media) to traditional art. F**K HYPES and F**K CANONS.

_

2025, mixed media painting on canvas.

More on my website.

[disordinarybeauty]

Purposely distorted!!!

"Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves..."

Poor wee lad Donald Trump, he got upset because he doesn't like his portrait in Colorado in the State Capitol. The Governor is such a naughty man to upset the pretty president. Trump claims that the portrait was distorted on purpose by the artist. I will show Faecal Trump what a portrait distorted on purpose looks like.

If you are a glitch artist, I included a Trump's photo for you to distort on purpose. Smash it! Trash it! Enjoy it!

MAKE GLITCH ART GREAT AGAIN!

[disordinarybeauty]

"Adolescence" on Netflix: A Stark Mirror to Our Digital Age and our relationship with our body and image on social media.

Netflix's new series Adolescence is a gripping drama that explores the dark side of youth, the fragility of families, and the complexities of justice.

It explores important themes like the male gaze, the objectification of women's bodies on social media, teen sexuality, bullying, toxic masculinity, guilt, violence culture, physical appearance and social acceptance, self rejection and exploitation. There is a lot going on.

The human body, its image and perception, its presence and appreciation, play a key role in this story. The way we look at others, and the way we are seen, and how it affects us.

In the third episode, Jamie is interviewed by psychologist Briony Ariston who needs to fill a mental health report before the trial. Throughout the whole interview, Jamie's mood fluctuates wildly between friendly, paranoid, aggressive, and threatening.

A furious outburst happens when Jamie is challenged about his physical appearance and why he thinks he is ugly and how does that make him feel.

The way we look, our body, has always been targeted becoming a very vulnerable part of us. Physical appearance triggers bullying. And the way we are perceived, and the way we feel about it, this toxic culture of beauty and appreciation, acceptance based on the way we look, social media amplifying to the obsession our relations with our body and the image of others breeding violence in our youth generation.

My work is challenging to the extreme these topics to promote inclusivity, self acceptance, and the respect of others because when the body is tortured by the judgmental and vicious gaze of society, when our body is turned into a cage, when we feel trapped in it, tormented by our own image, this is an terrible act of violence, physical and psychological. I experienced it on my own skin, I reacted and found peace in my own flaws. I know many others who went through it, I know the struggle, and I am working to give a voice to these stories to raise awareness on these topics.

"It takes a village to raise a child".

We are experiencing the first generations raised on social media. The first generations exploited, influenced, and ruled by the means of algorithms. The first generations having their vulnerabilities amplified and mirrored until obsession. The first generations whose identities are shaped by viral trends, metrics, AI, avatars, fake news, propaganda, subcultures, cults, deceiving realities, echo chambers, extreme fame and anonymity.

Dossed Adolescence.

Take care and look after your young ones.

[disordinarybeauty]

UNNÆMED: The D.B. 🥀🪞| THƏ L∆B ØF ∆NØM∆LIƏS as an experimental ground with Expired Polaroid Emulsion (Impermanence of the medium).

You don't know my name and I will stay unnamed.

UNNÆMED_01

_

IMG01 [Scan]

- Emulsion expired Polaroid (analog glitch) screenshot of an AI generated portrait + Dymo Label.

_

This artwork is part of my series D.B🥀🪞| THƏ L∆B ØF ∆NØM∆LIƏS, an anomalous+atypicals AI+Glitch portraiture collection aiming at exaggerating apparent physical flaws to denounce+trigger the attention on topics related to toxic beauty culture and the cult of image perfection to raise self awareness and mutual respect.

Expired Polaroid emulsion presents a distinct form of image disruption, a tangible testament to time's passage. Expired Polaroid's anomalies are rooted in material decay, the impermanence of a fragile medium.

The unpredictable color shifts, textural irregularities, and distortions seen in expired Polaroid prints arise from the gradual breakdown of the chemical emulsion itself. This organic process, a surrender to time, produces unique, often beautiful, imperfections that are inherently tied to the physicality of the medium.

Expired Polaroid's 'errors' are authentic markers of material instability. They serve as a poignant reminder of the fragile nature of media preservation, where an image is subject to the inevitable forces of decay. The resulting images are not simply flawed; they are time capsules, each imperfection a unique signature of the emulsion's journey.