«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.
Biography
Team: Artist and Development: Chris Elvis Leisi Artist and Sound: Christopher Lloyd Salter Machine Learning: Florian Bruggisser
The Immersive Arts Space (IASpace) at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) is a cross-departmental, interdisciplinary lab focused on a critical approach to new technologes through art and design and a critical approach to art and design through new technologies. Consisting of a team of research associates- with expertise in interaction design, game design, computer music, film production, computer science, performance studies and practice and sociology of science, the IASpace explores digital immersion, XR, Ai and the convergence of media-based and performative practices while socially-critically reflecting on these practices. Chris Elvis Leisi works as a lecturer in Game Design education and conducts artistice and design research in the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts in the field of co-location multiuser virtual reality experiences. Chris Salter is Professor/Director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and Professor Emeritus, Computation Arts, Concordia University Montreal.