doppelgänger: apparatus

doppelgänger:apparatus is a passthrough-based, multi-user mixed reality performative installation that uses a custom neural network-based pipeline to rapidly convert a single frontal photograph of each participant into an animated 3D reconstruction. Multiple public participants then confront these animated reconstructions co-located in the physical space in a strange and unsettling encounter between the digital doubles and the other participants. The installation is inspired by the increasing encounter with the uncanny, what Freud defined as the subjective affects such as dread, terror and unease arising not from what is entirely unfamiliar, but from something that is simultaneously known and estranged. Such uncanniness increasingly is occurring through the production of digital humans and AI-generated avatars. While state of the art technology tries to achieve perfect reconstructions and minimise what is famously called the “uncanny valley," the installation exploits the imperfect "poor image" (Steyerl 2009) created by digital systems in order to examine the new uncanny sensations that are arising as a central part of digital experience.