ambie drew
About
CV
Soft Bodies, Cold Machines (2026) is a two-channel moving image work that examines the production of identity, desire, and femininity within networked digital culture. The film follows Ambie Drew, a hyper-feminised alter ego navigating the unstable boundary between embodied experience and its mediated online representation. As she attempts to emulate the seamless perfection promised by screens, her physical and emotional state begins to unravel.
Set within a landscape of beauty technologies, nostalgic internet aesthetics, and domestic artefacts, the work explores how contemporary subjectivity is shaped through systems of algorithmic surveillance, self-performance, and commodification. The bedroom- historically associated with privacy, intimacy, and self-fashioning, becomes a contested site where identity is continuously constructed, monitored, and consumed.
Drawing on theories of posthumanism, digital labour, and online girlhood, Soft Bodies, Cold Machines considers what it means to inhabit a body that exists simultaneously as flesh, image, data, and product. The work reflects on the psychological consequences of living within platforms that encourage constant visibility, asking how intimacy, agency, and selfhood persist under conditions of technological capture.
Commissioned by arebyte Digital Art Centre