Presented at 3LD New York City 2015
As networked technology and our interactions with it expand so do our abilities to redefine ourselves in physical and digital worlds. Constructed digital identities sometimes closely approximate our physical selves but more often range from aspirational augmentations to complete fictions. While embracing and expressing our own personal myths through our interactions with social networks, we are simultaneously and unconsciously defined by the network itself; interactions, tracked and catalogued, breed and feed back information tailored to match mathematical interpretations of our behaviour. Presentations of online ecologies are shifting to conformity with the demographics we present through our avatars.
Exquisite Beast re-imagines the surrealist parlor game of The Exquisite Corpse (whereby each collaborator adds to a sketch on a folded piece of paper in sequence, not having seen the previous body parts). Audience members are invited to stand on a rotating platform and have their heads filmed, the heads then combined with various ‘torso’ and ‘leg’ 3D renderings to create different virtual modes of self.
Resulting from the process is a composite symbolic of an uneasy stitching of randomly chosen body parts creating a resonating patchwork identity. As more and more of us interact with the outside world through technology at the expense of human interaction, the more fragmented we become as we base more of our worth on idealised avatars and not the physical reality of ourselves.