doppelgaenger:apparatus

doppelgaenger:apparatus is a multiuser mixed reality experience that enables participants to confront their computer generated 3D doubles in a real physical surrounding. Enabled by a custom designed AI-based process, a frontal 2D image of the participants is taken and quickly transformed into an animated 3D reconstruction. From the moment the visitors put on the headset, they see the real environment captured by a camera on the headset. Gradually, this familiar space shfits, with the appearance of the visitors’ double standing before them. Co-present with other participants, visitors intimately interact with their ‘mirror image’ while observing and interacting with others doing the same. While at first the participants get the feeling of controlling their ‘mirror image’, this rapidly shifts as their doubles, free from the constraints of the original bodies, start to invade the participants’ personal space, leading to a disturbing and uncanny play between them. Historically, a doppelgänger was seen as a ghostly counterpart for a living person, seen as an omen or sign of death. Freud later argued that encountering one’s double produces an experience of “doubling, dividing and interchanging the self.” This installation thus takes the next step in exploring how new digital sytems increasingly produce uncanny tensions between our bodies and their captured other.

Video Copyright ZHdK 2024

Credits:  
Artist and Development: Chris Elvis Leisi 
Artist and Sound: Christopher Lloyd Salter 
Machine Learning: Florian Bruggisser

Next presentation: MESH Festival, 16. to 20. October at HEK in Basel. More information [here]

Recent exhibition: REFRESH x FANTOCHE, 04.-08. September 2024 from noon to 8pm.