Ekaterina Chernuha
An Unstable Image

The reflection you see in the mirror is not a single whole. The camera shows the face and body, but the image falls apart. Some areas are magnified, others distorted, others removed. The viewer’s attention is drawn to details such as the skin, outlines, and asymmetry, and the attention is held there. The image changes in real time, reacting to the viewer’s presence, but does not come back together to form a whole.

The work explores the experience of dysmorphia, which is a condition when a person’s perception of their body becomes fragmented, fixating on features that are seen as “defects”. This self experience is transposed into an external reality and executed as a technical operation. The image turns into a set of parameters to be measured and adjusted. An internal, subjective experience is turned into an almost mechanical process.

The project juxtaposes this mode of perception against an image analysis algorithm in a digital environment. Computer vision systems, filters, and social media interfaces also take our faces and bodies apart into their individual features, highlighting those that deviate from the standard. In this sense, the dysmorphic perspective is no longer the exception, but a symptom of visual culture, where a person’s experience of themselves is increasingly shaped through image analysis and optimization.