Yummy Teen!

Editorial Design, 2023

Yummy (Teen Edition!) is a fictional magazine created in collaboration with artist Elizabeth Renstrom and writer Coralie Kraft. All images and text in the magazines are AI-generated, a model trained on a generation’s media consumption and synthesizing an imaginary world set in the realities of the early 2000s.

Fashion spreads, photographs of teen heartthrobs, and dogmatic advice columns reflect the value systems promoted through media culture in the early aughts, reproduced perhaps as readily and uncritically by an AI model as they were consumed by young readers at the time. Brightly colored headlines, advertisements for beauty products, diet and exercise tips, and a homogenous array of teen faces fill magazine covers and interior pages in a context that is both dated and yet still reflective of much of today’s media culture.

Targeted specifically to young women, these pages recall and reinforce a shaping of ideas about diet culture, desire, and self-presentation, while also underlining the inherently sexist, fatphobic, and racist themes present throughout.

Three issues of the printed magazine were cut up, collaged, and photographed for Yummy, a solo exhibition of works by Elizabeth Renstrom as part of the Mid-Career Initiative at the Baxter St at the Camera Club of NY in 2023.

Exhibition images courtesy of Elizabeth Renstrom.

PRESS:
Aperture
Artnet
Observer