“Hi, um…You all know who I am—well, maybe you don’t.” Listen: it’s all the ambivalent intimacy of social media, summed up by a young woman who is preparing to ask us to assess her appearance. In “Am I Pretty?” Jennifer Proctor reinforces YouTube uploaders’ obsession with the evaluative gaze through repetitive juxtaposition, while redacting visual content with a pink screen. The work is a sonic remediation of a digital video meme from 2012: the unfolding audio narrative models the experience of clicking through a stream of videos and making sense of the patterns that emerge. “Am I Pretty?” might be considered a transmedia ethnography; it represents and interprets one media world using the materials and techniques of another. Proctor asks us to listen to the nuances of voices and ambient sounds to reconstruct a complex social world captured at a particular moment.

Proctor speculates that we will be sucked into the practices of judgment that these young women request of us, imagining how they look no matter how hard we try not to. Vocal timbre, regional accents, pitch, up-speak, and even microphone technique all led me to reflect on what constitutes “pretty girl” vocal affect. But the more powerful experience came in hearing the video makers guide me toward their “pretty” or “ugly” features. This is what got me thinking about this piece as ethnographic: “Am I Pretty?” requires us to understand these girls’ beauty standards in the terms that they provide. Their accounts express the maddening unknowability of “pretty” through fluency in specific signs of “ugly”: being “fat,” a “whale,” a “thing”; having very curly hair, a big forehead and tiny teeth, blemishes or uneven eyebrows. Being pretty, on the other hand, might involve hair, eyes, smiles, body shape, and makeup, but what exactly makes these features pretty is hard to say. Both good makeup and looking good without makeup are pretty. “Chubby thighs” are ugly—except another girl loves her “fat thighs” and says that guys do, too. The one universal truth about “pretty” seems to be that only other people can assess it. Unfortunately, friends, family, and bullies all have their own reasons to lie, so the most trustworthy evaluators are strangers on the internet and boys who ask you out. (“Am I Pretty?” depicts a resolutely heteronormative world.)

Proctor’s last speaker sounds relatively mature and confident. Her voice is lower in pitch and measured in pace; she describes bullying in the past tense. She still asks for our opinions, but also tells us, “In all honesty, I think I’m beautiful.” I hear her voice as African American, and with her final lines there is a visual fade from pink screen to black—a “Black is beautiful” confluence that makes for a hopeful ending. But we haven’t grown out of asking “Am I pretty?” since 2012. Rather, the question is so baked into the social media infrastructure of Facebook likes, Instagram hearts, and Tinder swipes that it no longer needs to be asked explicitly. Proctor’s work makes this question strange again by inviting us to listen to it sound out loud, over and over.

Reviewer Bio:

Kiri Miller is Professor of American Studies and Music at Brown University. Her work focuses on participatory culture, popular music, interactive digital media, and virtual/visceral performance practices. Her latest book, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media (Oxford, 2017), investigates how dance video games teach choreography, remediate popular music, invite experimentation with gendered and racialized movement styles, and stage domestic surveillance as intimate recognition.