Looking Closer: Skin, Body, Machine

In this issue, Becky, @originalmamatangyai presents her own work alongside five selected artists who use AI to explore the surface of the body in ways that are intimate, unsettling, and unexpectedly beautiful.

Some of the work gets up close to bodies and skin, drawing attention to pores, wrinkles, scars, and stretches, while others take a more abstract or surreal approach to how the body is seen and felt. Skin becomes more than just something that covers us. It turns into a place where identity, beauty, and even discomfort live side by side. The use of AI allows these images to hover between the familiar and the uncanny. There’s a raw honesty in how these artists approach the body. They don’t try to smooth things over or chase perfect forms. Instead, they focus on textures, marks, surface patterns and and the so-called flaws that make us real. It brings to mind photographer Nan Goldin, whose work has long revealed the beauty in vulnerability and imperfection. Like her, these artists invite us to look closely, to sit with the discomfort, and to find a different kind of truth in our physical bodies.

This approach taps into something Mikhail Bakhtin called the grotesque, where the body is shown in all its weirdness, not polished or perfect but messy, changing, and alive. AI becomes a kind of co-creator in this process. It distorts, blends, and reshapes the body into something that feels both digital and deeply physical. What we get is a mix of beauty and discomfort, a sense that identity is not fixed but constantly shifting. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway reminds us that we are already merged with technology, that the line between human and machine was blurred long ago. These works carry that idea forward, treating bodies and skin as a site where identity is shaped by memory, by machine, and by the act of looking itself.