avatar afterlife

The work avatar afterlife explores the representation of the human in the ‘digital afterlife’. Portraits were created in a 3D programme that depict various gestures and emotions. These become avatars that can be read as apparent representations of individual identity, but at the same time draw on stereotypical design patterns.
The digital portraits were printed out, painted, reworked and transformed into collages, resulting in 163 handmade slides that appear as (ghostly) avatars.
In the staging in the exhibition space, two slide carousels change the slides in different rhythms, continuously creating new combinations. Three further projectors project the slides onto rotating mirrors, which cause the projections to circle through the entire room. In the background, the voice of a possible avatar speaks a fragmented reflection on itself and its existence in the digital afterlife. This raises the fundamental question of whether such images actually represent an individual ‘self’ or merely fall back on prefabricated identity patterns and reproduce them.

The deliberate use of physical media for the presentation of the avatars emphasises the dimension of transience: analogue storage media are exposed to the influences of time and the environment and inevitably change. This decay is in tension with the digital ‘promise’ of immortality and eternal life and thus traces the myth of eternal life.

163 hand-painted slides à 2.4 cm x 3.6 cm room installation, variable dimensions, 3 slide projectors with rotating mirrors, 2 carousel slide projectors, sound 2024