In 1995, I was in a relationship with a woman from Singapore who lived in Australia. I would wake/stay up for our 3 a.m. chats, all over IRC via 28K baud modem. I came to realize that the self I was sharing with someone on the other side of the world was perhaps one of the emotionally truest versions of who I was. At the time I didn’t understand how to share my deepest thoughts and dreams with the people I lived with, or those I considered my best friends. Yet in this world of simple text and private virtual rooms, I was more fully “real.”
Sometimes I wonder if those strings of text still exist on a server somewhere, an authentic 20-year-old me trying to understand and share a self, as translated by computers screaming bits over phone lines. Could I be reconstructed from that database?
Almost three decades later, we have all been feeding fragments of ourselves into hundreds of databases that are farmed and cross-fertilized. They produce digital clones representing us in every important digital transaction and communication. As I was developing this show in mid-2021, we were just starting to imagine how to resume a more physical presence at work and school, and in our zoom hangovers wondering: Are our digital selves more important than our physical selves? How do our selves engage differently in our current world and culture? What ways have our assets and labor become digital only? Would you rather have someone hit you in the face or hurt your credit score?
Your digital self is also increasingly the one who “owns” your access to music, movies, event tickets, games and more, as our digital assets become our primary assets. David Rudnick started
describing some of these issues as an existential struggle for primacy where, “Physical prime: an ideology in which value + meaning only exist to the extent they can be traced to a physical source” and “Digital prime: an ideology in which value + meaning only exist to the extent they can be traced to a digital source.” The issue is that these are extreme ideologies, and like all extreme ideologies, they do not lead to a viable future. So we must find a balance, accepting and even embracing our digital selves and our physical selves for the roles they play.
But there is something about our digital self that is essentially different: our lack of control over them. They are effectively us, and yet our digital selves are constructed and presented by and for others. They are our doppelgangers. German for “double-walker,” doppelgangers were originally the spirits of living people who foretold of bad luck. The term is later culturally used to refer to a perfect twin, perhaps conjured by an alien or mystical processes. These doppelgangers possess all the same knowledge and memories as the original, but have their own, often oppositional intentions. More recently the term is used for the phenomenon of identifying people across social media and other internet-connected photo spaces who resemble the people we know, because so many digital photos look the same.
Our modern doppelgangers are a fusion of these ideas, being ethereal and yet somehow more real than us. We send signals every day to our doppelgangers in hopes that other people will like them, but they are also shaped by attention algorithms and ad research. They are not us, but for most of our modern social interactions, they now represent us in every meaningful way online.
The works in Doppelganger explore identities that cross and fuse boundaries. Each of the artists are exploring how they define the self, especially in connection with technological change. Each of the works will exist in digital and physical forms, the same and yet also very different because of the materiality or lack thereof. Perhaps each format will bring collectors a different understanding of the ideas, empowered by touch instead of channeling through a cursor. Hopefully balance and reconciliation can be found between the physical and digital, letting us celebrate both and also consider what control means in the rapids of our swift life streams.
