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Games

Cell Is A Virtual Mirror That Reflects Our Online Identities

Two artists examine the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of our digital selves.

CELL | 1 | showreel from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

We’re all guilty of stretching the truth every now and then, especially online where the temptation to construct an idealized version of ourselves is just so tempting, and easy. Maybe you’ve been a bit creative with your job title, or you often tweet something just because you think it’ll make you look clever. Or maybe you’re pretending to be a dead person. That’s the trouble with having a virtual version of yourself—it’s open to interpretation, and not just by the people who come across it, but by you, too.

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With all these fictions populating social media, James Alliban and Keiichi Matsuda decided to take our digital fabrications to task in this brand new art installation called Cell, commissioned for the Alpha-ville Festival 2011. Using the Kinect (four of them, to be precise) the piece tracks a person’s body as they stroll into the installation space, assigning them a fictional identity. This identity causes a series of tags—mined from online profiles—to float across on the digital “mirror” in front of them, creating a cloud of data that is a virtual reflection of their fictional identity and grows over time.

Interestingly, looks like Microsoft has come around to supporting all the Kinect hacking that’s been going on ever since the gaming console’s debut last November, which is fitting, since they’ve powered many an art installation. For this project, Microsoft supplied all the hardware, including the official Kinect SDK (Software Development Kit). The project also received support from Matchbox Mobile who provided, among other things, the ofxMSKinect, an openFrameworks add-on for the Kinect SDK that allows for auto user recognition.

The goal of the installation was to explore how we present our online selves and the small fictions we use to make up our social media identities. We emailed the two artists to ask them a few questions about the piece:

The Creators Project: The piece looks at our virtual selves and the fictions we create for these alternate identities. Why do you think people lie so much online, just because they can?
James Alliban: Just to be clear, we are thinking here about how people represent themselves on social media platforms, not virtual worlds or chat rooms where anonymity often leads to fictitious avatars. In terms of social media, people don’t generally set out to lie about themselves, this is not what is being addressed here. When shaping our online profile, we can be very selective about what we say or what media is associated with us. In many cases, it makes sense to do so, but through this selective inclusion/removal of data, we are essentially presenting an idealized persona. A fabricated version of ourselves that is closer to how we want others to view us.

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For this piece, we were interested in how this process might alter the way we are perceived, and ultimately limit us. By representing people as a fictional persona in the form of a cloud of data, we are attempting to make a connection between our physical and online selves to expose the difference between the two.

Do you think what's happening to our online identities, the commodification, is dangerous?
Keiichi Matsuda: Any new technology will have positive and negative effects. Broadcasting our identities online is a great way to connect with other people and have more control over how we are perceived, but this control comes with problems. Surveillance issues aside, creating an online face for ourselves forces us to unify the many different aspects of our personality into a single one, which then may make us more narcissistic or adverse to personal change. We may start to become shallow caricatures of ourselves, defined only by the content we link to. This sounds overly dramatic, but the scary thing is that this could happen slowly and without us realizing.

In the Wired article about your piece, Will Coleman from Microsoft says it's the first time the "UK’s developer and platform evangelism group has collaborated on an art installation" and also that it's great to build a bridge between the "Microsoft and the openFrameworks communities". Do you think they realize that the Kinect (or a hacked Kinect) has been such a hugely popular piece of hardware for artists since its release? And if so, is this a step towards that acknowledgement?
Alliban: Microsoft are well aware of the amazing work that tinkerers and artists have been doing with the hacked Kinect drivers. Whereas there seemed to be some initial hesitation, they are now starting to embrace these communities. Microsoft just released this video today, which is a celebration of how people are using the device for their own creative endeavors. Will’s team is looking to build a bridge between Microsoft and artists/communities interested in working with Kinect. They are already supporting several sound and light installations with a few established artists.

What was important about making the project open source?
Alliban: I often open source my projects. This is for a number of reasons. Mostly it’s to give back to the communities that dedicate so much time and effort to making and advancing the tools we use. In this instance, as it is the first openFrameworks project to use the ofxMSKinect add-on, I’m hoping that it will be particularly useful for those looking to get started with the technology.

As interactive artists/designers, what do you see as the future of our digital selves? What changes do you think we're going to see over the next 5-10 years?
Matsuda: As the line between the physical and virtual continues to dissolve, I think people will be much more aware of how they are perceived generally. Having grown up with the internet, I think that my generation was the first to be offered this type of identity construction, but now it’s becoming impossible to escape. In the near future (if not already), our projected personas will be checked and assessed in job applications, school admissions, insurance evaluations, anything you can think of where your character could be called into question. We may feel compelled to log all of our activity, if it is not done automatically. Our online identities will establish and define us as people. Some people will simply not worry and rejoice in their idiosyncrasies, but others may wish to hide some tendencies and preserve a normalized, publicly acceptable front.

Five to ten years is a long time in technology though. I think we can expect that the digital aura shown in Cell will be instantly accessible to anyone with a smartphone before the five year mark, but the cultural impact of this depends on how it is treated by the social media services and their interaction designers. In the past, the hugely nuanced concept of public/private has been oversimplified on the internet, but there are trends to suggest that the problem is being approached via preferences and controls. We need to accept that our digital selves are now a part of us, and find a way to make their positive effects outweigh the negative.