arebyte’s Hotel Generation Programme presents Soft Bodies, Cold Machines, a solo exhibition by British artist Ambie Drew.
Transforming the galleries into a teenage girl’s fantasy bedroom and metaphor for today’s internet culture, Ambie’s Soft Bodies, Cold Machines starts playful before slowly revealing an unsettling understory.
Exploring what it means to grow up online in a world shaped by targeted advertising and AI-generated imagery, featured works confront the audience with the impossibility of disentangling oneself from our curated digital persona. Capturing the anxiety of being consumed by the content algorithmic systems feed us.
To create this new body of work, Ambie purchased and tested popular beauty gadgets promoted to her through social media ads. The artworks that emerge from this process reflect both the physical and psychological impact of living amongst a constant stream of images and consumption. As boundaries blur between private and public life, human and machine, and reality and representation; the ‘girl-bedroom’ is reimagined as a cybernetic organism where these forces collide.
Ambie’s ‘girl-bedroom’ is staged across four main artworks: the short film Annihilation Transformation! reinterprets the iconic metamorphosis scene from the 1990s manga series Sailor Moon, while Girl™Altar takes shape as an interactive pink dressing table containing cutesy kitsch collectible trinkets gathered by the artist. The rotary phone-operated Memory Palace showcases how Ambie’s analogue memories are forever attached to her online persona. The two-channel film Soft Bodies, Cold Machines presents Ambie’s hyperfeminised alter ego taking center stage as she violently resists the machine.
Drawing on a lineage of feminist art, Ambie’s bedroom is both a political space and a personal archive. Her work echoes earlier explorations of identity, technology, and the body; while bringing these concerns into the present moment of AI-driven culture.
Yet rather than offering a purely dystopian vision, Soft Bodies, Cold Machines suggests the possibility of disruption, a ‘glitch’ in the system that might open up new ways of seeing, being, and resisting.
