Watching online beauty standards together at Stinky Truth.
On 7 August 2026, we held the second edition of Collective Scroll at Stinky Truth in Berlin. This time, the scroll moved through contemporary online beauty culture: lookmaxxing, surgerycore, beauty scores, filters, algorithms and the strange visual languages through which faces and bodies are increasingly measured, compared and transformed.
The session, titled The Standard and the Strange, moved through videos and images circulating across different corners of social media. Following the feed collectively, we looked at how beauty standards are produced through repetition, comparison and classification, but also at why certain images and ideas become so fertile on these platforms while others seem to disappear almost completely. The scroll opened questions around how recommendation, visibility and engagement amplify particular ways of seeing the body, making some aesthetics increasingly dominant, repetitive and extreme.
What emerged was a conversation about the changing relationship between beauty, identity and the image. From older forms of online self-presentation to increasingly quantified faces, AI-generated beauty and surgical aesthetics, the scroll traced a movement toward a culture in which appearance is constantly available for evaluation and optimisation.
The discussion after the projection expanded in several directions. Surveillance became an important part of the conversation, particularly around applications that analyse facial features and turn the face into a source of data: something measurable, classifiable and increasingly close to a kind of biometric fingerprint. Many participants also brought in their own experiences of negotiating beauty standards, self-presentation and the pressure to evaluate themselves through these systems.
A recurring question was why these ideas seem to find such fertile ground on contemporary platforms: why they become so abundant, so repetitive and, often, so extreme. The conversation moved from individual experiences toward the structures of the platforms themselves, and the ways repetition, visibility, recommendation and quantification can intensify particular ways of seeing the body.
As in the first edition, Collective Scroll displaced the individual feed into a shared space. The videos were projected onto the street outside Stinky Truth, watched collectively and followed by an open conversation that continued well beyond the scroll itself.
Collective Scroll will continue with new sessions, themes and locations.
Collective Scroll #2 — The Standard and the Strange
Stinky Truth, Berlin — 7 August 2026
photos: fbch.fotos