Crude Encryptions is Ruby Bailey’s ongoing experiment in the blurred space between visibility and disappearance - between being “seen” and being illegible. Here, Bailey continues to pose, perform, and stage her body with the same playful self-awareness that defines Loobtopia. But rather than delivering the image as a consumable surface, she encrypts it - rendering her own nude selfies into ASCII code, laser-cut panels, and etched mirrors. The body is still present, hyper-visible even, but it exists as a puzzle of signs, a surface that machines cannot read, a performance that slips away from the algorithmic gaze.

The series is tongue-in-cheek - equal parts seduction and withdrawal. Pieces invite viewers to both look and decode, to question what it means to consume an image that is at once intimate and obscured. The artificial mirror throws the gaze back onto the audience, implicating them in the performance; the frosted surfaces and metallic cuts suggest both soft fragility and industrial strength.

Through its accompanying website, Crude Encryptions also becomes a collective performance: anyone can upload a nude to be hand-encrypted by Bailey, transforming the vulnerable image into a kind of artisanal digital relic. This process plays with notions of trust, spectacle, and privacy: it is exhibitionism coded into a shield, intimacy disguised as a secret language only human eyes can interpret.

Positioned between Loobtopia’s glittering self-curation and Ethereality’s slow dissolution of identity, Crude Encryptions holds both states at once. It asks: What does it mean to be both technically invisible and endlessly exposed? In its shimmering surfaces, Bailey offers a wry commentary on how we perform for both machines and humans - posing, encrypting, and winking at the systems that can never truly “see” us.