Infinite Identities
Infinite Identities is dealing with the reproduction and creation of digital identities in an artistic and experimental way. How do digital identities differ from analogue identities and what are they about? The artist clones his digital alter egos in two different experiments to approach these questions.
Experiment – 1:
In this experiment 100 clones of the artist’s twitter accounts have been created to be shared with different people and they start to interact in the artist’s name. All the clones provide the same pieces of information as the original account: pre and last name, profile image, biography, website and geographical information. The only exception is that an additional ascending number has been added as a suffix (“mathiaslam1”, “mathiaslam2”, “mathiaslam3”, …,”mathiaslam100”).
Experiment – 2:
This experiment consists of three different machines, which, when combined, represent a clone factory. In an automatic process each machine controls a smartphone.
Machine-1 clones the artist’s Instagram account in an ongoing process and thus represents the base of the factory.
Machine-2 sets a topic in which the newly created identity will represents itself in future posts: #fitness, #design, #food. Subsequently, it creates new content, which will be uploaded to the various accounts.
Machine-3 interacts with other people’s Instagram accounts. It likes and comments on posts to gain a broader reach on Instagram.
Creating new content on Instagram always works in the same way. There is only one way to post new images, which keeps following the same steps. There is no recognizable difference between a human being or a machine following these steps. Therefore, a machine is able to adopt human behaviour. Each machine receives its own pattern for creating new clones, interacting with other users and posting new content on Instagram.
Both experiments reproduce the artist’s identity and fill it with new spirit. In the first experiment the clones are controlled by human beings and in the second one by a fully automatic algorithm. What influence does this have on the identity?