Autoscopia, 2009

by Adam Nash (SL: Adam Ramona), Christopher Dodds (SL: Christo Kayo) and Justin Clemens (SL: Jack Shoreland)
Audiovisual portrait assemblage
Courtesy of the artists

Autoscopy is a psychological condition in which a person believes that they see their own body as another in the world: an 'out of body' experience.  The virtual avatars of the digital realm have made this potentially terrifying, hallucinatory experience a banal matter of everyday life. The artwork created by Nash, Dodds and Clemens examines the derangement of identities through the projection of our personalities into digital environments and questions just how much of our identity is contained in the data surrounding us on the Internet.  Upon encountering Autoscopia on Portrait Island, the viewer is invited to enter their name into the artwork's engine which then performs a deep internet search of images, texts, sound and video from which it creates a 3D abstract portrait of each name.