Mediated Bodies: The Body Before the After is a research-led moving image artefact exploring how algorithmically curated fitness content shapes body perception, comparison, and self-expectation. Centred on a fictionalised personal fitness journey, the work follows a viewer whose relationship with her body becomes entangled with Instagram fitness transformation videos.
Combining publicly available Instagram content, screen-based imagery, gym footage, mirror scenes, bodily gestures, and inner monologue, the artefact moves through six sections: The Feed, The Promise, The Attempt, The Comparison, The Loop, and The Body Remains.
The work examines how fitness transformation videos compress time, foreground dramatic before-and-after results, and obscure the effort, fatigue, repetition, and uncertainty involved in bodily change. Rather than explaining these processes directly, it translates them into an emotional and embodied experience: pausing on an image, saving a routine, attempting to change, checking the body, and returning to the feed. It asks what happens before a body becomes an 'after', and how knowing that images are edited does not always prevent comparison.
Wantong Zeng is a media student whose work explores algorithmic culture, body aesthetics, and social media. Combining critical analysis with moving image practice, her work examines how Instagram and algorithmically circulated fitness content shape perceptions of the body through repetition, transformation, comparison, and visual standardisation.
