Abyss

About

In Abyss, Arvida Byström continues her exploration of intimacy, digital desire, and identity, building on her acclaimed series In the Clouds. This project began with an experiment: she fed photography and imagery of herself through an AI-powered undressing website — a tool designed to generate fake nudes — and offered the results for sale with out disclaiming the process. In doing so, she examined not only the mechanisms of digital objectification but also the point at which these technologies create something more than human: strange distortions, surreal forms. In Abyss, these glitches become the core. Byström works with AI-generated imagery to create uncanny, hyper-feminine bodies. These forms become warped, stretched, fragmented, and transformed into abstract shapes. These visual manipulations critique how digital platforms shape — and often distort — the aesthetics of desire and the performance of identity.

At the heart of the exhibition is a sculptural installation modelled after the mutoscope, an early film-viewing device from the late 19th century, once also used to display soft-core pornography in private settings. Via a small opening, viewers can peer inside to find an AI-generated video, showing deformed, synthetic visions of an AI generated body. In this way, the work explores ideas of openings and enclosures resonating with the exhibition’s title Abyss, providing both a conduit to observation alongside an essential aspect of pleasure. Pornography, Byström suggests, is not just subject matter — it is infrastructure. Many mass market technologies were accelerated through the demand of pornography, such as the internet, 3G, camcorder and more. In Abyss, Byström invites viewers to explore if porn can be more than human and how desire is created through culture.