AI (Ancestral Immediacies): Digitale Zwillinge und Datendoppelgänger

In the organizer's words:

AI (Ancestral Immediacies): Digital twins and data doppelgangers

Installations, lectures, performances, talks

AI (Ancestral Immediacies): Digital Twinsand Data Doppel gangers addresses the rapid growth of virtual representations and synthetic replicas enabled by digital infrastructures and explores the implications of this "doubling" of life. A "digital twin" is a digital mirror image of a physical object, system or process that is kept up to date with data from the real world and can in turn be used to simulate, monitor or analyze its real-world counterpart. Unlike static archives, these simulations offer real-time access and malleability - a promise that can all too easily turn into forms of control. And yet digital twins are everywhere and nowhere: Alongside far-reaching proposals to digitally replicate entire nations such as Tuvalu and Singapore, the concept of twins has already led to a massive increase in AI personas acting for one, AI buddies and AI lovers. Within this ecosystem, so-called AI sycophancy, a phenomenon where chatbots are programmed to please their users, can mutate into chatbot psychosis; a parasocial relationship that does not alleviate anxiety, but also doubles it and potentially amplifies it on a large scale.

Considering the stories we tell ourselves about the carnal realities of life and how they affect the social, what does it mean to live in the mirror world of the digital twin's flattening? Since AI is unable to replicate the sensory multiverse of human and non-human experiences, it is time to pay more attention to embodied affects and responses to external stimuli as part of the game of doubling.

With Randi Heinrichs, Zas Ieluhee, Yuko Kaseki, Marina Otero Verzier, Esper Postma, Lars Sorger, Mieko Suzuki, Jasmijn Visser Bidou Yamaguchi