Mass media has always been fascinated by the human body. The first-ever movie, Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), captured the bustling movements of a crowd, marking the beginning of the body’s presence on screen. The advent of film technology resolved the long-standing dilemma of the fine arts. Human bodies had previously only been represented as static images through paintings and sculptures. While the theatrical body—the performative arts—could display dynamism, it was ephemeral. Film technology finally made it possible to capture and preserve the full physical potential of the human body. 

Initially, bodily motions were imprinted on strips of celluloid film. The next step was digitization, which reduced the weight of the material by converting the body of work into data. The progression to the digital age meant the extinction of heavy film reels, which elevated people to become more active creators, designing and building new bodies of digital pixels. Digital technology, including AI and VR, ostensibly grants us greater freedom from the physical realm. Yet, it also leaves questions about where we are headed in this technocentric world, particularly regarding how digital representations of the human body are affecting our reality. Is there something we are missing amid all this freedom?

Body Horror and Body Fantasy

AI is at the center of the rapid development of digital technology, and it’s compelling—it works as a perfect laboratory and canvas for reconstructing human physicality. However, whether framed as body horror or body fantasy, the reimagining of the body provokes issues regarding the consumption of bodily images and their impact on real bodies beyond the screen. 

The body horror genre in cinema demonstrates how we have always been fascinated by pictures of stripped flesh and bone. Generative AI has also engaged in this genre of anatomical deconstruction, digitally morphing the body like a lump of clay. On social media, hashtags like #AIhorror or #uncanny bring up works of body horror produced by AI, which all share the “uncanny-core” aesthetic. There is something strangely gratifying in the way AI relentlessly dissects and metamorphoses the body, making it hard to look away from the grotesque visuals. While AI pushes the genre to its extreme, almost to the verge of absurdity, it also exposes the human body to an even more superficial and exploitative system. Like the voyeuristic anatomical amphitheater of the Renaissance, where dissections were open to the public, the body image becomes a surgical spectacle in the highly visual-centered media landscape. Human anatomy is both fact and fiction in the digital world: the body stands not only as a reality, but also as an immaterialized illusion that relies on its fetishization. 

What happens when body horror changes to body fantasy? The hyper-real body as a gory spectacle readily satisfies viewers’ fantasies, merging with the deeply misogynistic consumption of real women. This fantasy is digitized through anthropomorphized AI, such as AI-generated virtual humans. These once-disembodied figures now appear as the epitome of beauty. Even though they exist only in the digital world, we are enthralled by these digitized bodies. In 2024, the first “Miss AI” competition was launched as a part of the Fanvue World AI Creator Awards (WAICAs). The ten finalists—mostly women in their 20s with glamorous figures and radiant smiles—were evaluated on their appearance, especially their ability to pass as humans. Scrolling through their Instagram accounts, it’s impressive how real and beautiful they seem. Yet, Miss AI merely repeats the symbolic “Miss Korea” parade, where young female contestants are broadcast live in blue swimsuits, smiling and waving to a crowd. And so, old discourse resurfaces: how beauty competitions encourage hyper-perfectionism and an unhealthy obsession with the illusion of beauty. 

The promotion of AI beauty pageants, however, also points to something even more insidious: a pre-existing social issue exacerbated by this technological development—the sexual exploitation of women. The beauty and so-called personalities of these contestants are manufactured by their creators. Unlike real-life celebrities whose personas are difficult to distinguish from their real personalities, the audience is hyper-aware of the superficiality and artificiality of these AI models. These fictional attributes make them especially vulnerable to exploitation. They appear real—just enough to be impressive, but not enough to deceive completely—forming a loosely crafted emotional connection with viewers. This morally gray connection has already revealed its danger in the rapid rise in online sexual exploitation using deepfakes. This face-swap technique has been increasingly used to gratify one’s sexual desires. Yet the absence of the real, tangible human body weakens the sense of violation. Moreover, these violations are not contained in the digital world, often having consequences for the models’ real-world counterparts. In short, the way AI realizes our body fantasies hinges on exploiting the perceived soullessness of the generated bodies—a technologically sophisticated advance, but a regression of our society’s empathic and ethical foundation.

The Melancholy Machine

While AI is engaged with the image of the body, virtual reality introduces more complex agendas regarding how new forms of media affect both our minds and bodies. The virtual world introduces us to a wholly new dimension. We are shifted from mere spectators to autonomous players, enabling us to move beyond traditional media experiences toward embodied ones. The technology feels revolutionary or even transcendental—but is it truly? Virtual reality reveals just how powerfully fabricated experiences affect our bodily senses and eventually, our psyche. 

Climax of the Next Scene (2015), a film by Kim Jisun, delves into the most accessible VR experience around us: online video games. Kim meets a group of players in Grand Theft Auto (GTA) who call themselves “suicide artists.” The so-called artists spend their time inside the game finding 100 ways to die—an endless cycle of their digital characters’ virtual deaths. Instead of playing the game as was intended, these players have established their own set of rules. Such behaviors imply the desensitization of the body: the players remain physically unscathed, yet the addictive repetition of killing their characters leaves tiny cracks in their minds. The thrill—this“unreal sensation”—begins to replace the violence of the act itself. The peculiar case of suicide artists is even more thought-provoking than the long-standing controversies surrounding abusive gaming culture. The game they are playing mirrors reality: real societal anxieties ooze from the monitor, anesthetizing the players and soaking into their broken psyches. 

The virtual experience centers on the individual. Unlike films, which follow a fixed narrative and montage, players independently explore the generated setting. Physical contact is effaced, and solitude is required to achieve immersion. As a result, the body drifts from the physical world while virtual stimuli clouds the senses of distracted players, further intensifying the isolation of individuals in modern society. Thus, the audience becomes lonely players, and the closed society of virtual reality only grants users a superficial sense of omnipotence. Violent and suicidal behaviors remain spectacles, while the political and social dimensions of violence are pushed out of focus. In this way, the system functions like a melancholy machine, reproducing and amplifying collective depression and anger. In brief, the virtual world renders individuals even more “individualized,” desensitizes their physical bodies, and traps them in an endless cycle of mindlessly crushing pixelated bodies.

Sympathy for the Digital Body

The world of digital technology feels quite liberating—you can do whatever you want. Today’s media experience can be understood as an engagement with the digital body and the embodied experience of digitized human physicality. However, the relationship between technology and the body appears exploitative, with the latter being reduced to a subordinate of the former. In the face of this bleak reality, introspection into our responsibilities and roles as human beings is more necessary than ever. And it begins with the most fundamental question: what is the body in the 21st century? 

The body has always been transgressive and political; it isn’t confined to biology and nature. As proven by gender fluidity and cyborgs, the structure of the masculine and feminine, humans and machines, is not as binary as we believe it to be. The concept of the body has become even more expansive as it now includes digital bodies—categorical divisions like the real and the virtual, the material and the immaterial, or fact and fiction don’t matter. These weightless bodies may lack corporeality, but they function as potent and controversial vehicles that carry even greater political weight than real bodies. Today, humanity’s anatomical interest in the body as an object has shifted to a new dimension: the digital body is the new amphitheater—a spectacle, an inquiry, and a reminder that the body mirrors the state of the mind. 

With the dismantling of body politics in the digital age, our conception of the body must move towards a harmonious and sustainable integration with technology. Although beauty may still lie in the eye of the beholder, beauty-seekers in the technocentric world must acknowledge that their sensory apparatus is no longer entirely their own but increasingly shaped by technology. Understanding the bodies of the 21st century, therefore, begins with cultivating a sympathetic approach toward the constantly fragmented and violated bodies that exist both on and off screen. A truly appreciative media experience emerges when digital-flesh dualism is dissolved: the body is equally valued in both realms, transcending the aversion to the declining body or the presumed superficiality of the convenient, digital one.