The Digital Abject

The abject threatens life, it must be radically excluded from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which threatens the self.

Barbara Creed, Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection, 1996

Grumpy aims to challenge our understanding of digital intimacy. Its protagonist is a computer-generated 'Anatomical Venus', an Enlightenment-era anatomical figure, cast in wax from human organs. The figure’s entire front body is cut-open and is seen singing to the viewer. The slick wax-like computer aesthetic transforms the artificial into living: a dehydrated puppet with a metallic vertebral column, suggesting industrial manufacture and clinical precision. The figure, immobile except for her moving mouth, lies dissected on a table, revealing only her reproductive organs with an animated foetus. The figure feels immediately strange and abject, both morbid and unnervingly familiar.

Optimised for smartphone viewing, Grumpy’s portrait video format transforms our personal devices into windows of anatomical spectacle; a deliberate reminder of contemporary platforms like Instagram or OnlyFans, where intimacy becomes simultaneously intimate and programmatic. This digital commission and presentation, builds on Hansen's earlier work and continues her critique into current debates about digital labour and automated content generation.

The edit and composition of Grumpy moves between stillness to close-ups, from hovering higher angles to eye level perspectives, fluctuating between harsh lighting to darkness, becoming clinical and theatrical. The work is both a medical illustration and a pornographic representation, reminding us of what theorist Mark Fisher described as the uncanny ‘Putting the strange within the familiar, and is centred on the self’. Fisher’s definition sheds light on how Hansen's work generates unease through its manipulation of familiar interfaces – the phone screen becomes a portal to industrial intimacy, while the vertical format forces viewers into uncomfortable proximity with the dissected figure.

The display of internal organs represents a fundamental transgression of boundaries – between inside and outside, private and public, the real and the imaginary. This transgression gains new relevance through Helen Hester's concept of Xenofeminism which is a theory that asks us to imagine a world beyond our current understanding of gender, race and class through the lens of technology.

Hester's ideas help us understand how Hansen’s use of digital tools and interfaces serve as a critique on how human bodies can be manipulated and consumed online, in pornography, in tech and in gaming industries. In some of Hansen’s earlier works such as DICKGIRL 3D(X) (2016) a work that delves into the virtual pornographic body and in Maintenancer (2018) a documentary on the maintenance of sex dolls, the body becomes so abject it transcends any identity classification. This is also something experienced in Grumpy and amplified with a soundtrack made up of the artist’s voice, introducing an extra layer of uncanniness. The human voice, presented alongside the grotesque body with the slick computerised texture reduces the figure to a fictitious robot. The artist’s track "When will I fuk u iRL" reinforces that gap between digital intimacy and physical absence, its raw recording quality contrasting sharply with the plastic, cgi perfection of a doll-like woman.

In today's hyper-digital world, where screens mediate most of our interactions and influence our physical and emotional rhythms, the pursuit of genuine intimacy has become increasingly fragmented. The ordinary use of dating apps and the total integration of AI, chatbots, and algorithmic social platforms introduces a peculiar interplay between human vulnerability and machine-driven detachment, creating spaces where intimacy is not only sought but also commodified. This dynamic, marked by automation and new forms of dependency, mirrors the aesthetics of body horror—a genre that thrives on triggering fight or flight responses through the grotesque transformation of the human form. The artwork also references pornography, as the main industrial driver of contemporary content online, which repeatedly and addictively distorts and amplifies bodily desires.

Grumpy reveals how contemporary intimacy is shaped by these industrial processes while remaining haunted by human vulnerability. The work positions itself at the intersection of medical display, manufactured desire, and digital embodiment, creating a space where the uncanny nature of technological intimacy becomes viscerally apparent.