THE BODY REMAINS A BATTLEGROUND – MARGARET MURPHY ON THE COLLISION OF TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL BIAS

Anika Meier: We met online during the pandemic. I remember the workshop on online exhibitions that I led together with the artist Manuel Rossner at the Hartford Art School. You were one of the students in that seminar. What do you remember from that time when it comes to online exhibitions?

Margaret Murphy: When I saw what you and artist Manuel Rossner, among others, had presented in Decentraland through your online exhibitions, I remember feeling intimidated! I thought, “There’s no way my cohort will accomplish something like this!” Of course, we didn’t have to—because I learned that, just like with any physical curation, a virtual exhibition ought to serve the art it presents. That was hard for many of my classmates. For them, the idea of a photograph was still strongly tied to the physical print.

Lockdowns were challenging everything we knew about life and the conventions of society—so why should exhibiting art be excluded? The average person today engages more with an image on a screen than with one printed on paper. It made sense to present art in a way that speaks to this fact. We were no longer physically, geographically, or financially limited. It became a starting point for me to consider an artistic practice that used photography as a jumping-off point—moving me toward exploration and away from staying inside a box.

AM: The year 2020 wasn’t that long ago, and yet so much has changed. Online exhibitions are no longer a major topic, the NFT hype is over, and yet there is a new generation of artists who feel at home online and still primarily create their work for that space. How have you experienced these changes as an artist?

MM: How many times have NFTs been declared dead? I’ve lost count. I’m sure you have as well. NFTs are still an important part of my artistic practice—just like social media and printed work. They were the first way I supported myself as an artist and paid my bills. While that may not always be the case, I can’t dismiss the impact NFTs have had on my life and the lives of many artist friends. It’s not sustainable for NFTs to have crazy hype—a bubble always bursts—but now, as you and I know from being engaged with the space daily, it seems to be stabilizing. Artists don’t sell works for crazy amounts of money like they might have four years ago, but the NFT space offers an alternative ecosystem that discusses topics and themes often disregarded by the traditional art world. Code-based and computer art, for example, have a much greater appreciation here than in the “trad art” world.

All in all, though, I try to continue making art that engages in dialogue with art history. Creating pieces solely for the NFT market or to appease a social media algorithm feels inauthentic and unsustainable.

Over the past five years, we’ve witnessed a massive technological shift in both social media and AI. It’s crucial to produce work that interrogates and responds to these changes—especially for women and non-binary artists—so their voices are documented alongside cultural evolution in a meaningful way. This is a major reason you and I founded the curatorial collective The Second-Guess, I would say.

The idea to revisit the 2015 online exhibition Body Anxiety, curated by Leah Schrager and Jennifer Chan, was an example of this kind of contextualization. In our version, Body Anxiety in the Age of AI, we look back at the topics discussed ten years ago (and more) that addressed technology, social media, the female body, and identity. In 2015, it was an online exhibition on a website. In 2025, we presented the exhibition online in the metaverse of HeK Basel and on the NFT platform Objkt on Tezos. We have kept up with the times and gone where the audience is online.

AM: You come from a photography background and have worked with both the camera and smartphone for many years. Are social media more of a curse or a blessing when trying to make a name for yourself?

MM: Like most things in life, there’s a balance. I’ve recently started thinking of social media as a garden that needs tending—but overworking any garden is just as bad as neglecting it. In my thirties, and I think many of my peers feel the same way, it’s about being intentional with our time online. Are we contributing to and consuming media in ways that benefit us and our network?

It’s hard to imagine an artist having a successful career today without social media. It’s still the most accessible way to reach people and engage them with your artwork. You and I were connected via Instagram well before we met, after all. If I hadn’t had Instagram, we probably wouldn’t be in dialogue today!

AM: What were the reactions to your self-portraits, in which you sometimes presented yourself in a very open and vulnerable way?

MM: My 2021 photography series, I Could Look at You All Day, consists of self-portraits and still lifes made in my home. Aesthetically and conceptually, the work was influenced by art history, memes and pop culture, and Internet aesthetics. This body of work focuses on the self-surveillance experienced by women, as described by John Berger in Ways of Seeing, and how the Internet and the male gaze affect this in a post-social media society.

Many people “got it,” and many did not. The range matters to me because it reveals the different relationships people have with the female body, especially in self-portrayal. People who engage with social media understand it differently from those versed in art-historical self-portraiture—and differently again from viewers with experience in neither.

I welcome feedback, positive or negative, because any reaction means someone is truly engaging with the work, which is what I want as an artist. The worst-case scenario is a universal “Looks great!” with zero follow-up.

AM: And although the camera accompanied you for so long and you were your own model, you now work almost exclusively with artificial intelligence. Do you remember when you first came into contact with AI?

MM: The first time I heard of AI was probably the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence from 2001. I should probably watch it…

But the first time I started working with AI was in the summer of 2022. A friend introduced me to the text-to-image program Midjourney. He showed me how to craft a prompt with words to produce an output image on a Discord server—something I never imagined myself doing after earning my Master of Fine Arts in Photography. It was so easy and absurd that I think I did it non-stop for an entire day.

AM: What were your thoughts back then?

MM: I was completely enamored by it. As a photographer, I’m used to orchestrating images from reality. Using words to create an image from a database of unknown training sets felt like playing a guessing game about what Midjourney recognized. I was also constantly generating images—more prolific than I’d been with a camera in years. Trying out an entirely new artistic medium was exciting to me.

Because I’m a self-portrait artist, the first thing I asked Midjourney to depict was myself. That meant describing myself with more specificity—maybe even too much detail—than I was accustomed to. I became fascinated by the associations it attached to certain words about the female body and by how heavily those terms shaped the visuals. Describing myself meant using words like “fat,” and the model struggled to realistically render a fat woman. Bodies are subjective, but it was either a thin woman or something that barely resembled a human at all. I explored that limitation in my 2022 piece Fat Woman Lying in a Garden Surrounded by Flowers.

People say that AI algorithms are biased, but that’s not quite correct—the bias isn’t in the algorithm itself; it’s embedded in the training data used to teach it, which reflects our society.

In 2025, Midjourney has evolved through four versions, and the outputs have become more photorealistic than ever. I’m curious to see how visual literacy adapts as AI-generated imagery becomes pervasive.

AM: Artificial intelligence is often sharply criticized, especially by photographers. What is your stance on the harsh criticism of AI, particularly regarding concerns about job loss and the high energy and water consumption?

MM: I encourage people to be curious rather than critical about things they don’t understand. Contempt prior to investigation is something we all ought to avoid. Perhaps they won’t be so upset when there is a newfound appreciation for photography books or chromogenic prints—similar to the rise of interest in vinyl records after the invention of the iPod.

Environmental concerns are valid, but AI isn’t going anywhere. I’m eager to see how the tech industry makes AI more environmentally sound, whether that progress comes from public pressure or new legislation.

AM: How have your themes changed since working with AI within the confines of your own home?

MM: AI has opened creative possibilities I could never reach with a camera alone. Conceptually, it’s an ideal medium for wrestling with cultural dichotomies. I’ve used it to portray Los Angeles, scrutinizing the clichés attached to both the city and the technology. I also reimagined the great American road trip—immortalized by the male photographers of the 1960s and 1970s who shaped contemporary photography—through the female gaze using AI.

My latest series, The Door Was Never Closed, currently on view as part of the exhibition Virtually Yours, revisits the adolescent bedroom as a traditional safe haven—how I experienced it as a millennial teen in the early 2000s and still feel about my own room today. Yet we are now acutely aware of the harm early internet exposure can cause, even as AI and other technologies promise real societal benefits.

Over the past twenty years, we’ve shifted from “Internet Optimism,” through “Internet Pessimism,” to what Al Hassan Elwan calls “Internet Realism” in his Protein.xyz essay on post-doomerism. I lean into this Internet Realism, staging it in the teenage bedroom to highlight both the risks and possibilities today’s teens face, using visual dichotomies of beauty and danger: an underwater ocean bedroom with sharks gliding above the bed; a thunderstorm with lightning striking just a bit too close for comfort; or a perfectly pink furnished room adorned with sharp spikes.

AM: You no longer need to go out with a camera or look for models—you can turn ideas into images within seconds. It’s becoming easier and easier to create images, but increasingly difficult to create ones that might one day enter the canon of art history. How do you evaluate images created with AI? What makes a good image in the age of artificial intelligence?

MM: A good image, AI or otherwise, asks something of the viewer. It creates tension, curiosity, or discomfort. With AI, the challenge isn’t technical execution anymore; it’s intent. If the image exists solely to prove that you can make it, it’s easy to dismiss.

This imagery, I guess, is the “AI slop” people like Hito Steyerl are talking about right now. This “slop” is important, though. It anchors one end of the AI spectrum, not unlike how the rise of the smartphone impacted contemporary photography. Not every picture made with a camera—be it film or iPhone—is profound. I love the slop because it’s entertaining, a lot of the time. Like a meme, it’s a capsule of our time. But it’s different from the art made with AI that moves me by commenting on important cultural topics and challenging the way I think.

AM: Your work engages with pop culture and feminism, and explores how new technologies affect the role of artists and the perception of bodies. What are your latest insights?

MM: My latest insight is that for every step forward we make, we take two steps backward. AI allows for deepfakes, especially of women, and there seems to be no way to prevent this from happening against our will. Women are still taught to see one another as competition rather than teammates—that liking Taylor Swift is cringe, being young and thin is the ultimate beauty goal, and if you’re not married with kids by 35, you’re a failure. Fortunately, though, we seem to be more aware of the problems with these perspectives than in the past. But self-awareness can only get us so far.

In a society that seems to be threatening the total evisceration of anything existing outside of convention, I know there are communities and voices advocating and fighting to prevent repeating a history we no longer wish to endure. I just hope we can weather the storms we’re currently in.

AM: How do you see the future of creativity in the age of artificial intelligence?

MM: I am optimistic that with AI speeding up the time required to make art and lowering the barrier to technical skills, more people will take the opportunity to create art than they otherwise would have. With more artists, competition grows steeper. Competition, I think, pushes artists to improve.

It’s no longer enough to create something simply beautiful. There has to be a strong concept and substance. Art in the age of AI needs to ask questions we may not have answers to but that will inspire us to think critically during this watershed moment in culture.

AM: Thank you for the insightful conversation!