Abstract
This study investigates selfies as complex sites of subjectivity formation, examining how
embodiment and mediation intersect within contemporary digital culture. Drawing on haptic
phenomenology, the research challenges the traditional privileging of vision by demonstrating
the inseparability of sight and touch in both the production and reception of selfies. Through a
practice-based methodology, incorporating the creation and analysis of self-reflexive artworks,
the study explores how the selfie operates simultaneously as process and product, capturing the
act of ‘seeing oneself seeing oneself’ while revealing its own conditions of production.
Situating selfies within the historical lineage of self-portraiture, the study engages with
theoretical perspectives to reconceptualise self-representation as an embodied, constructive
process rather than a fixed depiction of subjectivity. It argues that selfies dissolve binary
distinctions between subject and object, as well as vision and touch, through mechanisms such
as reflection, double apprehension and digital mediation.
The research positions selfies as relational and processual systems that generate networked and
refracted subjectivities across physical and digital spaces. By foregrounding the role of the
sensing body and its interaction with technological interfaces, the study contributes to broader
understandings of digital subjectivity as being fluid and continuously constituted through acts
of mediation and sensory entanglement with body and device.