Everybody Wants to Optimize, No One Wants to Do the Dishes

Controlled by rigid visual metrics, the series follows a bio-unit's daily aesthetic labor under an internal panopticon. Staged through a lens of domestic absurdity, the self-portrait series ironizes the brittle line between voluntary self-improvement and self-policing—revealing looksmaxxing as merely the newest, masculinized iteration of systemic aesthetic labor traditionally pushed upon women. Through Byung-Chul Han's concept of digital 'psychopolitics,' the project critiques how modern subjects willingly exploit themselves under the illusion of personal freedom, flattening the human body into a machine engineered for market compliance. Yet, forcing these strict algorithmic routines into chaotic domestic spaces creates an intentional glitch. By reducing the body to an engineered achievement-subject, the feedback loop disrupts the rigid gender binary—shifting the body away from Friedrich Nietzsche's decaying 'Last Man' and pushing it into the hybrid, defiant realm of Donna Haraway's Cyborg. To embrace this messy partiality is to refuse the optimization demanded of us.

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