The digital arts and humanities

Springer GeographyCharles Travis Alexander von Lünen Editors The Digital Arts and Humanities Neogeography, Social Media and Big Data Integrations and Applications... Part I Arts, Human

Springer Geography

Charles Travis

Alexander von Lünen Editors

The Digital Arts and

Humanities Neogeography, Social Media and

Big Data Integrations and Applications

books, aiming at researchers, students, and everyone interested in geographicalresearch The series includes peer-reviewed monographs, edited volumes, text-books, and conference proceedings It covers the entire research area of geographyincluding, but not limited to, Economic Geography, Physical Geography,Quantitative Geography, and Regional/Urban Planning.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10180

Charles Travis • Alexander von L ünen

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The “Information Bomb” that Virilio (2000) described has washed like a digitaltsunami through the humanities as much as the arts Online art, digital art, thedigital humanities, environmental humanities and digital heritage—all are buz-zwords and the jargon at play in early twenty-first century academia Yet—at least

in the humanities—there’s a growing concern what the digital is supposed to deliver

in terms of new insights for scholarship and pedagogy Ontological and mological shifts are indeed occurring Phillip Barron’s observation captures theconsternation of a generation of academics native to analogue methods for whichthe digital is terrae incognitae:“for many of us trained in the humanities, to con-tribute data to such a project feels a bit like chopping up a Picasso into a millionpieces and feeding those pieces one by one into a machine that promises to put it allback together, cleaner and prettier than it looked before.” (Barron 2010) For aca-demics adopting the digital, Andrew Prescott’s observation that the digitalhumanities is becoming “annexed by a very conservative view of the nature ofhumanities scholarship,” (Prescott 2012) serves as a timely warning Too manydigital humanities practitioners, he observes“have too often seen their role as beingresponsible for shaping on-line culture and for ensuring the provision of suitablyhigh-brow material.” Prescott (echoing Virilio) states that “this is a futile enterprise

episte-as the culture of the web hepiste-as exploded The internet hepiste-as become a supremeexpression of how culture is ordinary and everywhere, and there is a great deal for

us to explore.” (Prescott 2012) The role of the World Wide Web (WWW) is just astarting point to begin addressing these challenges, and underlines the magnitude

of the tasks ahead in facilitating rigorous, imaginative and innovative research andteaching initiatives The WWW acts as a basin in which the digital humanities, asSvensson (2012) argues, can

[ …] serve as a laboratory, innovation agency, portal and collaborative initiator for the humanities, and as a respectful meeting place or trading zone for the humanities, tech- nology and culture, extending across research, education and innovation This meeting place would normally extend far outside the humanities proper and could include the humanities as well as other academic disciplines, industry and the art world.

v

A main challenge facing scholars and teachers is to create and engage digitalmethodologies which reflect the strengths of the arts and humanities, rather thanthose which simply conform to engineered preconceptions of the digital toolsemployed The academy’s relationship with technology must be reconceptualized.

In contrast to interdisciplinarity, new paradigms are emerging which go beyondmerely providing digital or social media links between traditional academic disci-plines, groupings and networks As the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 recog-nizes: “the modern university segregated scholarship from curation, demoting thelatter to a secondary, supportive role, and sending curators into exile withinmuseums, archives, and libraries.” However, the revolution sparked by the digitalarts and humanities “promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research andteaching landscape.”1Driven by cultural and technological changes occurring overthe last half century, the digital transformations of the early twenty-first centuryhave a precedent from the 1960s Marshall McLuhan provided forecast of sorts onthe shift from the analogue to the digital by drawing upon a literary and dramaticarts metaphor

[ …] today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned Rapidly we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society [ …] the Theatre of the Absurd dramatizes this recent dilemma of Western man, the man of action who appears not

be involved in the action Such is the origin and appeal of Samuel Beckett ’s clowns (McLuhan 1987, 3 –4)

Indeed, one generation’s concept of absurdity becomes another generation’s zone ofopportunity, and several observers commented on the analogue to digital shiftoccurring at the turn of the twenty-first century as Western ontologies and episte-mologies were becoming“technologically disrupted” due to the mass proliferation

of cybernetic assemblages Denis Cosgrove contended that thinking in science andtechnology studies was dissolving the epistemological distinctions between the artsand the sciences (Cosgrove 2005, 51) Donna Haraway observed that the emergingubiquity of human interactions with technology were creating hybrid machine andorganic“cyborgs.” (Haraway 1991, 151) Far from being deterministic or dystopian(as McLuhan’s metonymic Beckettian clowning), Haraway argued that “cyborgimagery” suggested a “way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explainedour bodies and our tools to ourselves […] it means both building and destroyingmachines, identities, categories, relationships.” (Haraway 1991, 181) Nigel Thriftproposed that due to the intervention of digital software, the human body wasbecoming a tool-being in symbiosis with the new electronic time-space shapingsocial perceptions and experiences of the world (Thrift 2008, 2, 10)

1 “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0.” 2009 http://www.humanitiesblast.com/manifesto/Manifesto_ V2.pdf

Over the last 20 years three overlapping waves have marked the evolution andinnovation of arts and humanities digital scholarship and practice Thefirst wave’sdigitization of historical, literary and artistic collections coupled with the emergence

of online research methods and pedagogy, dovetailed with a second wave ofhumanities and arts computing quantification exercises, and digital parsing, anal-ysis, and visualization projects Currently, a third wave is cresting and the onto-logical tables are turning as arts and humanities discourses and tropes are nowbeginning to shape emerging coding and software applications, allowing digitalpractices to come into league with the visual and performing arts to forcetrans-disciplinary encounters betweenfields as diverse as human cognition, bioin-formatics, linguistics, painting, gaming, New Media,film, historical, literary, cul-ture, and performance studies, painting and drama (Travis 2015)

It is in such a manner that we need to“surf” the crest of third digital wave so as

to harnesses digital toolkits and create models in service of the core methodologicalstrengths of the humanities, such as attention to complexity, medium specificity,historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation (Travis 2015).Willard McCarthy states that humanities computational models“are better under-stood as temporary states in a process of coming to know rather thanfixed struc-tures of knowledge,” and reminds us that “for the moment and the foreseeablefuture, computers are essentially modeling machines, not knowledge jukeboxes.”(McCarty 2004) Prescott (2012) contends that“If we focus on modeling methodsused by other scholars, we will simply never develop new methods of our own,”and continues,

[ …] if we truly believe that digital technologies can be potentially transformative, the only way of achieving that is by forgetting the aging rhetoric about interdisciplinarity and collaboration, and starting to do our own scholarship, digitally A lot of this will be ad hoc, will pay little attention to standards, won ’t be seeking to produce a service, and won’t worry about sustainability It will be experimental.

Invoking a somewhat radical, but nevertheless salient argument, Mark Samplecontends that the“digital humanities should not be about the digital at all It’s allabout innovation and disruption The digital humanities is really an insurgenthumanities.” (Sample 2010) In this regard Svensson (2010) asks “would we expectdigital humanists to become involved in pervasive gaming,flash mobs, and onlineinstallations or Twitter performances?” He argues that the digital humanities “has aset of embedded core values—including a predominantly textual orientation and afocus on technology as tool—some of which are challenged or diluted through anexpanded notion of the field This should not be unnecessarily construed as aproblem, but it adds to the sense of afield in a dynamic state.” (Svensson 2012)Does recognizing and rebelling against these core values by“thinking outside of thebox” of orthodox humanities approaches allows us to consider a wide variety ofengagements?

Can the arts provide assistance in this regard? Computer art, as it was calledwhen it arrived on the scene in the 1960s, faced similar criticism that humanitiescomputing—as precursor to what is now branded “digital humanities”—receives.Computer art was perceived not to be art at all, but mere graphic design (likewise,humanities computing was/is seen as mere number crunching); all it offered wereboring geometric patterns (detecting statistical relationships is named as the mainbenefit by many digital humanities advocates) However, Art, in this regard, is nottoo different Leaving aside the deliberate attempts to use art as a tool of propa-ganda, art schools were heavily influenced by contemporary science and technol-ogy, often reflecting wider social, cultural and political debates French art theoristFernand Léger published a short essay in 1914, Contemporary Achievements inPainting In his text he laid out the impacts that modern science and technologywere having on modern art such as Impressionism, and social and human agency inthe early twentieth century:2

A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth century artist; so much so that our language, for example, is full of diminutives and abbreviations The compression of the modern picture, its variety, its breaking up of forms, are the result of all of this It is certain that the evolution of the means of locomotion and their speed have a great deal to do with the new way of seeing (L éger 1973, 11–12)

One can discern the nature and influence of technology on art here But where elsedoes the compression of space and time—if not their annihilation, as Karl Marxonce quipped—become more visible in the twenty-first century than in the areas

of the digital arts and humanities? The “diminutives and abbreviations” Legerreferred to are most visible contemporarily in the social media worlds of Twitter,Instagram, SnapChat, Flickr, YouTube, etc Likewise, the tropes of “speed” and

“abundance” are permeating the arts, the humanities and geography alike Art waschallenged by the ever-blurring boundaries between virtual and physical worldswhen photography emerged to challenge established visual vocabularies—firsticonicity and then authenticity—in the early nineteenth century The division oflabour between art and the actual emerging out of the invention of photography—painting to depict the imaginary, photography the real—soon became brittle, asindividuals grew suspicious of the claimed authenticity that photography claimed topossess

The chapters in this book illuminate how digital methods by employing arts’ andhumanities’ tropes and perspectives can navigate around the misplaced expectationsand “analogue disciplinary orthodoxies” that hinder the paths to relevant scholar-ship and pedagogy This collection contextualizes the digital arts and humanitieswithin disciplinary discourses such as history, performance studies, geography andgeohazards, environmental humanities, indigenous and Irish studies, conflict

2 See von L ünen’s chapter in this volume for a further discussion of Léger’s quote.

transformation, urban mobility, social media, neo-geography and Big Data Indoing so it offers case studies on how to facilitate digital literacy and researchinvolving visualization, language, human behaviour, culture, society, time andplace.

Haraway D (1991) Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature Routledge, London

L éger F (1973) Functions of painting Thames and Hudson, London

McCarty W (2004) Modeling: a study in words and meanings In: Schreibman S, Siemens R, Unsworth J (eds) A companion to digital humanities Blackwell, Oxford

McLuhan M (1987) Understanding media: the extensions of man Ark, Toronto

Prescott A (2012) Making the digital human digital-human-anxieties.html Accessed 15 Apr 2016

http://digitalriffs.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/making-Sample M (2010) I ’m Mark, and welcome to the circus Comment on HASTAC blog entry, http:// hastac.org/blogs/cforster/im-chris-where-am-i-wrong Accessed 11 March 2015

Svensson P (2010) The landscape of digital humanities Digit Humanit Q 4(1) Accessed 15 Apr 2016

Svensson P (2012) Envisioning the digital humanities Digit Humanit Q 6(1), http:// digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000112/000112.html Accessed 15 Apr 2016

Thrift N (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect Routledge, London & New York

Travis C (2015) Visual Geo-literary and historical analysis, tweet flickrtubing, and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) Ann Assoc Am Geogr 105(5):927 –950

Virilio P (2000) The information bomb Verso, London

We, the editors, would like to thank the American Historical Association (AHA) forhosting our session “GIS and History: Epistemologies, Considerations and

Reflections” at their annual meeting 2015, where the idea for this book took shape.The editors would also like to thank the contributors for their work, the Springerpublishing team for their support, and each other for a good and fruitful coopera-tion Alexander von Lünen would like to thank the History Division in the School

of Music, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield (UK) for aninspiring environment, and Charles Travis does likewise for the School of Historiesand Humanities, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Last, but not least, thanks to our wives, partners, friends and families for theirlove and support

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Part I Arts, Humanities, Social Media

1 When Selfies Turn into Online Doppelgängers: From Double

as Shadow to Double as Alter Ego 3Amanda du Preez

2 Beuys Don’t Cry: From Social Sculptures to Social Media 23Alexander von Lünen

Part II Indigital Mapping

3 Aboriginal Digitalities: Indigenous Peoples and New Media 49Armida de la Garza

4 Kiowa Storytelling Around a Map 63Mark H Palmer

Part III Digital Practices in Irish Conflict and Peace Studies

5 A Digital Exploration of Hunger Strikes in British Prisons,

1913–1940 77Joseph Lennon and Michael F Johnson

6 Digital Practices of the Moral Imagination, Socially Engaged

Theatre and the Creative Transformation of Conflict in Northern

Ireland 95Suzanne H Foy and Charles Travis

Part IV Neogeography, Mobility and Performance

7 Historical Memory and Natural Hazards in Neogeographic

Mapping Technologies 119Francesco De Pascale and Sebastiano D’Amico

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8 Driving Screens: Space, Time, and Embodiment

in the Use of Waze 139Regner Ramos

Part V Place, Text, and the Environmental Humanities

9 Digital Place-Making: Insights from Critical Cartography

and GIS 153Marianna Pavlovskaya

10 Text and the Sensorium: The Augmented Palimpsest

as an Augmented Reality Text 169Andrea R Harbin and Tamara F O’Callaghan

11 The Digital Environmental Humanities—What Is It and Why Do

We Need It? the NorFish Project and SmartCity Lifeworlds 187Charles Travis and Poul Holm

Arts, Humanities, Social Media

Social media is shaping twenty-first century global society, culture and history It

is also redefining and transforming the human sense of individual and collectiveidentity In the academy its ontological ramifications are barely recognized, if evenunderstood In this regard, Part I examines tensions between mediality, perceptionand the engagement of social media in the disciplines of film, culture and performancestudies and digital history

Amanda Du Preez’s Chap 1 discusses the nature and status of interpersonalcommunication has changed irrevocably, and expanded the ways and means of self-expression Du Preez states that the ‘Selfie’ can be viewed as the folk art of thedigital age and in her chapter addresses the phenomenon’s wider social and culturalimplications and ponders whether selfies become our “second selves”?

In contrast, Alexander von Lünen’s Chap.2parses his practice of digital historythrough the art and philosophy of German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986).Von Lünen’s relates Fluxus to wider debates in the digital arts and humanities Beuyscoined the term “social sculpture” to refer to the potential of art as a social product

to transform society and onlookers as part of the artwork, creating the potential ofevery person to be an artist Von Lünen’s then considers Fluxus in the contexts ofphenomenology, the World Wide Web and social media as means to reconsider theboundaries inhibiting the development and practice of digital history in the academy

When Selfies Turn into Online

Doppel g ¨angers: From Double as Shadow

to Double as Alter Ego

premo-Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture

of Dorian Gray (1891) The shadowy double has also appeared in numerous films

from Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966); Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), and recently The Double (dir Richard Ayoade, 2013) to name only a few On social

networks the selfie (self-induced double)—mediated by the accessibility of mobileand handheld technologies—proliferates as virtual stand-in or Doppelg¨anger forthe self Selfies are online persona that can constantly and instantly be updated anduploaded to be viewed and evaluated by others They create a telepresence to facilitatecontinuous accessibility and a sense of omnipotence As selfies become ubiquitousother impostors such as the DATA Doppelg¨anger (the digital data trail one leavesconsciously or unconsciously), threaten online selves like a repressed shadow Butperhaps the specter of the Doppelg¨anger is most forebodingly figured by programmeddigital personae such as MyCyberTwin and Project Lifelike that simulates presence

by interacting and responding to others as the person would Thus the online personanot only looks like the person but also now acts as the person In this sense the onlinepersona no longer represents but rather presents the self

Keywords Digital and online art·Identity·Selfies·Doppelg¨anger

A du Preez (B)

University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

e-mail: Amanda.DuPreez@up.ac.za

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

C Travis and A von Lünen (eds.) The Digital Arts and Humanities,

Springer Geography, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40953-5_1

3

Social media has changed the nature and status of interpersonal communication

irrevocably It has also expanded the ways and means of self-expression The selfie,

defined as a “self- generated digital photographic portraiture, spread primarily viasocial media” (Senft and Baym 2015, 1558), has become the preferred means forself-expression in the digital age.1In 2012, the selfie was nominated by Time mag-

azine as one of the ten buzzwords of the year and in 2013 it was declared as theInternational Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries Even those in high digni-tary positions cannot resist its mesmerizing pull, as the selfie taken by US PresidentBarack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron with Danish Prime MinisterHelle Thorning-Schmidt, attending Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in December

2013, demonstrates.2Meanwhile, the reality TV star Kim Kardashian has recently

released a publication, Selfish (2015) containing more than 1,200 selfies.

Selfies are the folk art of the digital age (Williams2006), precisely because theyare omnipresent through tools such as web cameras and smartphones with front-facing cameras In contrast with the traditional genre of self-portraiture reservedprimarily for artists and aristocracy, now most global citizens can participate in

expressing themselves via selfies The Selfie Africa website (http://www.selfieafrica.com)—aimed at celebrating true African beauty—is an indication of the prevalence

of selfies on the continent of Africa, for instance Whereas the multimedia research

project Selfiecity capitalizes on its prevalence by presenting a comparison of five

cities’ outputs of selfies notably, New York, Moscow, Berlin, Bangkok, and SˇaoPaulo.3Self-expression has indeed taken a demotic turn as Turner (2010, 1) reports:

It has become commonplace to notice the increasing number of opportunities for ordinary

people to appear in the media From the vox pops in news bulletins to the celebrity that comes

with participation in reality TV, from calling up your local talk radio host to competing for

stardom in Idol, from posting your favorite images on Facebook to becoming one of the

notorious Web ‘cam-girls’ – the possibilities of media visibility seem endless.

The demotic turn was already anticipated by Andy Warhol (who can in all

like-lihood be identified as the father of the selfie with his self-portraits taken in photo

booths)4 when he predicted that “everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes”

1 Reportedly there are about 53 million photos tagged with the hashtag #selfie on Instagram and the word selfie is mentioned over 368,000 times on Facebook updates Google also reports that in 2014 approximately 93 million selfies per day were taken on Android models alone Brandt (2014).

2 This infamous selfie was named “The Selfie of the Year” and apparently caused a scandal iegate”) because of the circumstances under which it was taken Milner and Baym (2015).

(“Self-3Selfiecity, a research group around American media scientist Lev Manovich, investigated how

people photograph themselves with mobile phones in five cities around the world The project analyzed 3,200 Instagram selfies shared in New York, Moscow, Berlin, Bangkok, and Sˇao Paulo (640 from each city) More interactive results from the study can be found at http://www.selfiecity net, accessed 21 October 2015.

4 Walker-Rettberg (2014, 42) identifies photobooth photos as the precursor to selfies: “Photobooth photos are one of the closest relatives of today’s selfies, with their almost-instant production of

in the future.5 He could not have anticipated that digital media would shrink theduration of fame to 15 s and neither could he foresee the latest development, namely:

“In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.”6This means we are movingtoward an era of micro-celebrity (Senft2008) as the distance between the private andpublic implode and shrinking audiences become more intimately part of the atten-tion economy It is, however, not only the democratization that requires investigation,but also the impact on our understanding of ourselves and the relationship with thischanging reality that needs exploration To unpack the “growing presence of digitalself-portraits” (Lasén and Gómez-Cruz2009, 209), we have to inquire what selvesare mediated by digital media? Or to paraphrase a renowned theorist on the subject,Sherry Turkle, to what extent do selfies become “second selves?”

In this regard, it is interesting to note that Turkle no longer refers to the computer inoptimistic terms as a “second self” as she did in earlier, perhaps more utopian texts.7

Instead, Turkle now understands the self to exist in (at least) two different worldsconcurrently She critically notes the infiltration of digital technologies into all strata

of human existence and, in particular, the substitution of intimacy and commonality

by the phenomenon of being ‘always on’ She captures the predicament as follows:

“We are increasingly connected to each other but are oddly more alone” (Turkle2011,19) In her latest text, Turkle (2011, 6) does not hesitate to provide an overwhelmingdooming picture of the status of online selves:

I once described the computer as a second self, a mirror of the mind Now the metaphor no longer goes far enough Our new devices provide space for the emergence of a new state of the self, itself, split between the screen and the physical real, wired into existence through technology.

The drive to be ‘always on’ does not mean we no longer desire intimacy, munity, togetherness, and approval, but these have become the motivational factorsfor the use of social media In other words, Turkle suggests that we have turned tosocial media to compensate for the loss of togetherness in time and space

com-In what follows the selfie as online self-induced double is first contextualized

Then the Doppelg ¨anger’s (double) mythical and literary roots are introduced, in

order to expand the discussion of the selfie to the online double Two instances ofthe online double are unpacked, namely the double as shadow and the double as astand-in or alter ego The double as shadow is evoked online through the mining ofdata regarding the self that is captured consciously and unconsciously to create what

is known as the Data Doppelg ¨anger The figure of the Doppelg ¨anger is further

vividly conjured through virtual stand-ins that act on behalf of the self to create a

telepresence through examples such as Project Lifelike and rep.licants.org.

6 This is attributed to Weinberger (2005).

7 Turkle (1984) does so more specifically.

Selfies as Virtual Doppel g ¨anger

The selfie stands in the tradition of doubling, imitation, twinning, cloning, alter egos,mirroring, masks, and shadows To the degree that selfies are impersonations, theyare also mimetic creatures In other words, they evoke interaction between self andother, subject and object, presence and absence, presentation and representation Themanner in which the self manifests primarily, on social networks, and on Facebookspecifically, is through the profile, which includes biographical and professionalinformation, personal preferences and photos

As an integral part of online profiles and photo sharing platforms, the selfieannounces the virtual substitute or avatar that interacts on behalf of the (real) self, or

as one of Turkle’s respondents describes her Facebook profile as “an avatar of me” oreven more tellingly, “my Internet twin” Turkle (2011, 165) Senft and Baym (2015,

1589) interpret the selfie as both a “photographic object that initiates the transmission

of human feeling,” and as “a practice a gesture that can send different message to

different individuals.” The selfie thus negotiates the complex intersection betweensubject and object as the self is both photographer and the subject photographed, cre-ator and created However, it is important to note that although “the selfie signifies asense of human agency” it is transmitted, displayed, and tracked through nonhumanagents, meaning that its digital presence tends to “out[live] the time and space inwhich it was orginal[ly] produced” Senft and Baym (2015, 1589)

The digital presence thus obtains a life of its own as the work by artist-coder,

Maia Grotepass, entitled #autoselfie (see Fig.1.1) illustrates how software mic interventions) on mobile devices, for instance, affects the human interpretation

(algorith-of selfies As Grotepass (2014, 283) observes: “Our [images] are mediated; touched

at bitlevel by the software systems they traverse.” Selfies are therefore not just imagesposted; they are combined with metadata from the mobile device sensors, user hash-tags and social network info In fact, we have no guarantee that the data entered willnot be altered or shared (Grotepass2014, 286) The code can be changed, interceptedand the self-image is transformed accordingly In her selfie project, Grotepass (2014,289) attempts to make “the invisible metadata behind the image” visible by showingthe “fragility” of the digital image once it enters the data flow Grotepass makes thedifference between self and digital self, evident, by showing it as other to the self.Through this othering, the selfie creates a presence in the absence of the physicalself—to be more precise the selfie becomes a telepresence that facilitates continu-ous accessibility and omnipotence (The extent and reach of this omnipotence willbecome evident in the examples discussed later on) It is probably more accurate

to refer to selfies, not in terms of mimetic resemblances, but rather as processes orevents spread over digital communities and networks globally (Avgitidou2003, 131).Instead of aiming at duration or documenting likeness truthfully, as traditional self-portraiture proposed, the selfie is created in anticipation of the momentary glanceand admiration of online onlookers Also, selfies are serial by nature or repetitive.One selfie is never enough: “Digital self-presentation and self-reflection is cumu-lative rather than presented as a definitive whole” (Walker-Rettberg2014, 35) The

Fig 1.1 Maia Grotepass, #autoselfie (2013) With kind permission of the artists

accumulation has become so rapid with the pauses in-between shrinking that it ismore accurate to refer to the serial self-disclosure as a form of “lifecasting.”8

8 Lifecasting is the continual broadcasting or streaming of one’s personal life through digital media,

e.g., iJustine.

Putting your life on display became popular with the notorious webcam girls of the

late 90s of who lifecaster, Jennifer Ringley (19 years at the time) on the JenniCam

site, is perhaps the most well known In Ringley’s case, it is probably correct tostate that she became a shadow of herself in real life while her online personalityflourished When Ringley now reflects on her “performative experiment” she prefers

to avoid the “internet-based lifestyle she helped pioneer” (Knibbs2015) and rathertries to return to life again This is more or the less the premise for the television

series Selfie (2014, director, Emily Kapnek) in which the protagonist, Eliza Dooley

(played by Karen Gillan and with a definite reference to Eliza Doolittle), similarlyhas to find her way back to reality Eliza’s character invests all her time and energy onsocial media fame and friendships and has forgotten the cues for human interaction

in the flesh After her virtual self is “assassinated” by a viral video, she has to relearnhow to interact meaningfully in real life

I am not suggesting that real life interactions are unmediated or not tinted byrole playing In fact, as Goffman (1959) suggests, there are certain rules and rolesthat also apply to presenting the self in everyday life Everyday personhood goeshand-in-hand with wearing a mask Although this may sound counter-intuitive themask allows for the ability to present an acceptable social front The social frontconsists of embodied cues and signs that allow us to understand and interpret oneanother We, therefore, play roles during our exchanges such as the doctor and patient,teacher, and student By playing roles, unintentional gestures that may slip throughand cause misunderstandings can be contextualized and interpreted Thus we arealways busy with “impression management,” according to Goffman (1959, 161).These misinterpretations can apparently be transposed to self-representations onlineand, in particular, when embodied gestures are lacking in online communication(compare for instance phenomena of deceit for example the notorious over flatteringMySpace angles and other misleading digital depictions)

It can be argued that elementary interactions (or offline interactions) includeshared co-presence in terms of place and time, where appearances, gestures andvoice correspond (Autenrieth and Neumann-Braun2011, 18) During online inter-actions, our words, appearances, gestures, and voices do not necessarily correspondbut are differentiated and separated Seeing that we are not confronted online with allthese corresponding elements, it requires new skills to effect meaningful communi-cation and gain insights into one another It also indicates that we have to compensatefor the loss of co-presence online Naturally, these factors impact on how we depictourselves online and how onlookers may respond to our self-depictions

But, such a stark division between the virtual and real self is untenable since

we no longer ‘go online,’ we are in a certain sense always already on Computinghas become ubiquitous or is computing “where we already are and of which we areincreasingly a part” (Elwell2013, 235) As Elwell (2013, 243) proposes,

The transmediated self describes the integrated, dispersed, episodic, and interactive narrative identity experience in this space between the virtual and the real The transmediated self is not the exclusively online identity of Facebook or the identity construct compiled by data mining companies Neither is it the tangibly embodied identity of the analog world Rather,

it refers to the identity experience emerging from the feedback loop between the digital

and the analog whereby one domain informs the other in an ongoing dialectic of existential equivalence.

What is the self that lingers in this liminal space but a virtual double?9Therefore,

the selfie can be branded as a self-induced online double or virtual Doppelg ¨anger

that complies with the demand to be ‘always on.’ As part of the demand Facebookusers, for instance, utilize the platform, not only to expand networks, create con-nections, share information or to be entertained, but indeed for self-expression andself-disclosure It is for this reason that selfies are often linked to narcissism, and

if Kim Kardashian’s book of selfies is any indication, this may be a very probableconclusion

The obsession with the self is poignantly identified by Van Zoonen (2012, 60) as

“I-Pistemology,” with “I (as in me, myself) and Identity, with the Internet as the great facilitator.” In the era of I-pistemology, the self turns into the center and sole source

of knowledge and truth (Van Zoonen 2012, 57, 60) At an alarmingly increasingrate networked culture offers the opportunity to transform the self into a product of

immaterial labor through self-branding (Hearn2008; Page2012; Chen2013; Kanai

2015) Self-branding “involves the self-conscious construction of a metanarrative andmeta-image of self through the use of cultural meanings and images drawn from thenarrative and visual codes of the mainstream culture industries” (Hearn2008, 198).The branded self is created by means of “a detachable, saleable image or narrative,which effectively circulates cultural meanings” (Hearn2008, 198) The currency inwhich the branded self prefers to trade is “the very stuff of lived experiences” (Hearn

2008, 213), which are shared through an endless stream of updates, pictures andpertinently selfies The final aim is to create an “authentic self-brand” (Banet-Weiser

2012, 73) The elusive “authentic self-brand” is achieved by inflecting the self intothe double strategy of prosumption where the distinction between production andconsumption, producer and consumer have been blurred (Zajc2013) If the selfie isthen understood as the epitome of self-branding (as in the case of Kim Kardashian),

we see the self thus “transforming what it doubles and extends, producing a version

of self that blurs distinctions between outside and inside, surface and depth” (Hearn

2008, 201) However, it would be erroneous to deduce from this trend that all selfiescan be understood in terms of narcissism only

First, an analysis skewed toward narcissism tends to ignore the expressive ities that social network sites afford users and how selfies in particular, as “mirrorimages” (Walker-Rettberg2005, 184), aid in exploring and coming to an understand-ing of ourselves Furthermore, as McLuhan (1994) explains in his essay “The GadgetLover,” wherein he employs the Narcissus myth to interpret technology use, it would

qual-be an over simplification to identify merely self-reflection and self-love with the end If the myth is opened up to the roots of Narcissus, which stems from the Greekterm narcosis or numbness, a richer understanding arises What is revealed is that themyth does not suggest self-recognition as such, but rather self-amputation McLuhan

leg-9 “The Doppelg ¨anger is this liminal subject that allows for the relation between image and fication to be infinitely repeated, while that repetition, in turn, allows for the subject’s differential identity” writes Vardoulakis (2006, 114).

signi-(1994, 41) maintains: “The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the waterfor another person This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until

he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image.” Narcissusdid not fall in love with his “selfie” but more accurately was self-amputated, numbed

by the image, and stood in service of the image : “He had adapted to his extension

of himself and had become a closed system” (McLuhan1994, 41) McLuhan (1994,42–43) tries to explain our fascination with technologies as an extension of ourselvesand how it leads to a “kind of autoamputation” or “generalized numbness or shock”

in an attempt to cope with the over stimulation of the new device or technology Asour bodies are extended by new technologies they are also amputated in the process

to obtain equilibrium again (e.g., the invention of the wheel lead to the ‘amputation’

of our legs) In terms of the myth, Narcissus was not so much flattered by his image

as shocked into numbness

Thus, two main processes can be extracted from McLuhan’s discussion of ourinteraction with technologies, namely self-amputation and self-amplification (exten-sion of the self; Wendt (2014) The selfie accordingly runs the risk of becoming anall-consuming reflection that both extends (viewed from a narcissist angle) and ampu-tates (viewed from a shocked and numbed point) I will utilize the two processes in

my analysis of contemporary examples of where the self is amplified and amputatedthrough the virtual double

But perhaps a few introductory notes on the double or Doppelg ¨anger is essary to contextualize the phenomenon The Doppelg ¨anger is a mythical crea-

nec-ture whose specter has haunted ancient folklore and myth but has become ularly fashionable during the early nineteenth century amongst artists and novelist

partic-of German Romanticism and the British Gothic movement The ominous figure

of the Doppelg ¨anger is captured as literary motif in amongst others Jean Paul’s

Si ebenk ¨as (1796); Feodor Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), Robert Louis son’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The

Steven-Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).10

During the early twentieth century, Freud’s psychoanalytical interpretations of thedouble contributed to the proliferation of the double “in the modern imagination”(Jeng 2005, 246) Freud interpreted the double as a repressed part of the self that

is encountered in the form of an uncanny stranger (Das Unheimliche) The modern

revival of the theme of the double differs significantly from the more benign andneutral versions in traditional societies (Živkovi´c2000; Faurholt2009), as the mod-ern version becomes a metaphor for disenchantment with irreconcilable differencesand a symptom of “mankind’s chronic duality and incompleteness” (Živkovi´c2000,

10The shadowy double has also appeared in numerous films from Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966); Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), and recently The Double (dir Richard Ayoade, 2013) to name only

a few According to Rank (1971, xiv) the double has rich and layered anthropological, religious and

psychological origins expounding “the relationship of the self to the self.” The term Doppelg ¨anger

literary means “double-goer” or “double-walker.” The double can appear as twin, ghost, shadow, guardian angel, the soul, or a mirror reflection; in waking daylight and in dreams, in spirit and the material realm, and both as visible and invisible.

122) Whereas the double figured as a symbol of the eternal soul (immortality) intraditional societies it turned into its opposite by becoming a messenger of man’simminent demise (mortality; Živkovi´c (2000, 124)) In short: meeting the modern

Doppelg ¨anger is the kiss of death.

The Doppelg ¨anger is mostly duplicated through visual strategies made possible

by mirrors, paintings, photographs, and lately by digital replication The double is,

therefore, an image of the self or in the image of the self It is a representation.

The discussion now moves beyond selfies as merely capturing the self via digitalcameras toward selfies that take on new dimensions of doubling where it can almost

be argued that the online double or mask swallows up the self (or almost literallyswallows up the face as the Gombrich epigraph suggested earlier) Here Rank (1971,12) provides guidance by distinguishing two narratives associated with the doublenamely, the double that is clearly a visible cleavage of the ego (shadow, reflection)and the double that confronts the self as a separate real physical entity with “unusualexternal similarity.” Two main trends or types can accordingly be identified: the dou-ble as repressed split shadow (double by division) and the double as replica (dou-ble by duplication).11 These two doubles correspond with McLuhan’s two-prongedexchanges with technology, namely where technology extends our capabilities orself-amplification and the overwhelming engagement that leads to numbness or self-amputation The double as shadow refers to an unconscious state of not knowingand accordingly overlaps with self-amputation, whereas the amplified self refers tothe online persona that extends the self’s presence as alter ego In what follows thedouble as shadow and a form of self-amputation is discussed by referring to the phe-

nomenon of the Data Doppelg ¨anger Thereafter the double amplified and extended

through a virtual stand-in is discussed

Double as Shadow (Self-amputation)

As selfies become ubiquitous other impostors such as the Data Doppelg ¨anger (the

digital data trail one leaves consciously or unconsciously), lurks beneath online

selves like a repressed shadow The concept of the shadow and the Doppelg ¨anger

is intimately interlinked, not only in literature but also in psychology, as put forward

in CG Jung’s theories on individuation and integration of identity Jung identifiesthe shadow as the repressed and unacknowledged aspects of the self “consistingnot just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism”(Jung1916, 35) The shadow is not yet integrated in the conscious self and functionsautonomously “in opposition to the conscious personality” (Casement 2003, 31),

therefore it is a liminal encounter similar to the encounter with the Doppelg ¨anger.

Although, Jung does not perceive the shadow in negative terms only—for him itseffects can be positive as well as negative The trick is, however, to become aware

11 See Faurholt (2009) who makes this distinction between the double as divided and the double as duplicated.

of the shadow, “to find a way in which [one’s] conscious personality and [one’s]shadow can live together” (Jung1973, 12).

In Romantic literature exploring the theme of the Doppelg ¨anger the shadow and the soul are often conflated, as for instance, in Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter

Schlemihl’s Remarkable Story (1814) After selling his shadow to the devil, the

main protagonist, Schlemihl, has to go through life without a shadow.12 What isalso interesting is that the state of being shadowless is often interchanged with lack-

ing a reflection in the mirror Similar to Von Chamisso’s character, Schlemihl, who

spends a lifetime searching for his shadow; in ETA Hoffman’s “The Story of the LostReflection” (1815) we are introduced to Erasmus Spikher who exchanges his mirrorimage for a life of artistic decadence Possessing no shadow or reflection refers to thedivided double that has been visibly severed from the self or in McLuhan’s terms toself-amputation via the technological double In both Schlemihl and Spikher’s cases,the split from the shadow and the mirror reflection, respectively, speak to a chasmwithin the self which can only be reconciled at a price

When transposing the divided double to the sphere of ubiquitous digital media,

it becomes clear that the shadow of the self can take on a life of its own in the

flow of data and metadata As the Human Face of Big Data social network project

explains, we leave a trail of digital exhaust in the form of streams, texts and locationdata that will live forever.13 The picture that arises from this trail of data is “fright-eningly complete.” As we search for information and check-in to places we leavedata crumbs that are picked up and shared by platform owners “with third partiesfor the purpose of customized marketing in exchange for free services” (Van Dijck

2014, 197) We constantly contribute data explicitly and implicitly to data trackingdevices; meaning the explicit data is willingly provided while the implicit data comesunknowingly through searches, logons and site views (Walker-Rettberg2009, 461).According to Van Dijck (2014, 197), the compliance with personal information can

be interpreted as “a trade-off” because “masses of people—naively or unwittingly—trust their personal information to corporate platforms.” This seemingly neutral andinnocent transaction of data exchange, as for instance utilized in Big Data research,

is identified by Van Dijck (2014, 198) as “the ideology of dataism.” What is useful

for my analysis is that dataism assists in creating or mirroring another self, unknown

or undefined up to this point—a data double It is for this reason that most of datacollection or ‘life-mining’ is focused on the body: “First it is broken down by beingabstracted from its territorial setting It is then reassembled in different settingsthrough a series of data flows The result is a decorporealized body, a ‘data dou-ble’ of pure virtuality” (Haggerty and Ericson2000, 611) In a similar foreboding

12 The shadow is clearly a metaphor for the soul and Rank (1971, 68) confirms this by linking the double to the “immortal soul.”

13The Human Face of Big Data is a global social media project “that focuses on humanity’s new

ability to collect, analyze, triangulate, and visualize massive amounts of data in real time” (http:// thehumanfaceofbigdata.com, accessed 21 October 2015) They have an app that you can download and track loads of information about your day and then you are able to find someone who has the same data profile as you—your data Doppelg¨anger This might be the person with the same phone habits, similar commute and internet habits.

Fig 1.2 Best-selling author

A.J Jacobs, pictured here,

declares his love for

self-tracking in the essay

“Quantifying Myself.” Photo

to maintain control over it” and therefore, according to them, the Doppelg ¨anger

metaphor provides a useful platform to initiate a “debate on the dark side of digitalidentity” (Fig.1.2)

The most visible form that the data double takes is through the assistance of monitoring practices” (Ruckenstein 2014, 68) or what is otherwise known as thequantified self movement.14By tracking for instance heartbeat, movements, caloriesconsumed, and the number of stairs taken, the self is quantified and mapped onto a

“self-14The Quantified Self Labs describe their activities as “a collaboration of users and tool ers who share an interest in gaining self-knowledge through self-tracking.” The LiveScience website

mak-data double In fact, the self is turned into a project where “optimization becomes notonly possible, but also desirable” (Ruckenstein2014, 69) The data double makesreveals another self not previously reflected upon, similar to the mythical and psy-chological shadow that remained mostly unconscious and invisible As the self iscodified into data, a ghostly twin takes shape as part of what Arnzen (2014) iden-tifies as a “hauntology of the world wide web.” We may well speculate about theaccuracy of the self that comes to the fore through the data double Consider, for

instance, Dopplr.com—a free social media network service—generates a portrait of

travelers by compiling shared travel itineraries into visualizations.15 Also the

Nar-rative Clip, which is a wearable camera documenting every moment of your life,

and which promises to deliver a true image of the self But as many theorists cate, the digital double may rather be closer to a “(mis)interpretation by others and

indi-a (mis)representindi-ation by indi-an individuindi-al” (Reppel et indi-al 2011, 121) The data doublethat appears is both too narrowly focussed and vague at the same time As Walker-Rettberg (2014, 62) reflects on her use of self-tracking devices:

We don’t typically think of these self-tracking tools as self-representations in the same way

as we do self-portraits or diaries, but they do preserve and present images of us: images that are both very accurate and very narrow, whether they track steps, heart rate, productivity or location.

The double that takes shape, therefore, has pertinent limitations; it can be viewed

as rendering a view that is too close-up and too focused Perhaps providing too muchinformation and too little context? In other words, it does not provide a situatedoverview or integrated perspective of the self, but one mainly geared toward thequantifiable If the quantified self meets up with the qualified self, are they indeedtwins? Does the quantified self not create a shadow that aims to make me transparent

to myself? But as we know human existence often challenges us with unspeakablephenomena and overwhelming experiences that resist complete data translation andcontainment In fact there are many aspects of being human that cannot be translatedinto data

Douglas Coupland has a similarly skeptical view of the shared future with our

data Doppelg ¨anger or “cloudganger” as he refers to the double16:

Your cloudganger is actually a big tapeworm, a trillion bits long […] He’ll read every email you ever sent, everything you’ve ever purchased, your edible history, everywhere you’ve ever been in front of a camera, your dating patterns, your child-rearing patterns, your voice, your inflections, the way you make typos […] After a long-winded unraveling of how—with the acceleration of technology and the internet—[your cloudganger] evolves to become an idealized version of you […] and he will one day transcend you.

(Footnote 14 continued)

describes the aims of the quantified self-movement as “to measure all aspects of our daily lives with the help of technology Wearable devices such as activity trackers, along with apps that let us log our every step, snack and snooze could bring us a better understanding of ourselves, our nature, and may even benefit our health” (http://www.livescience.com/topics/quantified-self, accessed 21 October 2015).

15The Dopplr.com service was launched in 2007 but has since been disbanded.

16 Quoted from Li (2014).

The fear of being overtaken by the shadow double is not a new theme within the

literature and discourses on the subject Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

has to be one of the most obvious examples where Dorian is immortalized throughhis shadow portrait hidden in the attic The shadow threatens to overtake his lifeand in the end Dorian has no choice but to kill both Whether our data doubles willindeed overtake us remains merely speculative, but these specters do confront uswith aspects of ourselves not formerly observable

Finally, the Human Face of Big Data project provides a handy application that

can be downloaded to meet your data Doppelg¨anger on screen The app promises

to assist in “learn[ing] about yourself, how you compare to others, and what yourphone can tell you about your life Compare answers about yourself, your family,trust, sleep, sex, dating, and dreams with millions of others around the world Findyour Data Doppelg¨anger” (Against All Odds Productions2012) On the site wecan see the happy merging of data twins—people who share the same quantifiableinterests—as male and female faces morph and different ages and races become oneand the same Although fascinating, the question begs if one share the same dataprofile than someone else does it mean we are mirror images? Or rather what is thenature of that mirroring? How many shadows does one have? If our shadows arereflected through “a ‘data double’ of pure virtuality” what does this mean in terms

of our understanding of ourselves with technologies?

Double as Alter Ego (Self-amplification)

The double does not only manifest as a shadowy data double but also as a self that hasduplicated or cloned itself in the form of an alter ego Here the interaction with tech-nology is typified as one of self-amplification in McLuhan’s terms The amplified self

is evident in various manifestations of which the selfie, discussed earlier, is perhapsthe most productive As already established the selfie requires incessant maintenanceand updating, since it is geared toward immediate presentation and not longevity orduration This means the online self is not a static expression or an autonomousproject (as was the case with traditional self-portraiture), but rather figures more as

a communicative instrument that requires continuous participation and interaction(Van Doorn2009, 585) The production of the selfie is however not only fixated oninstantaneousness but also omnipotence As communicative demands increase thevirtual presence progressively replaces or stand-in for the “rare commodity of phys-ical presence” (Autenrieth and Neumann-Braun2011, 19) More and more the “realspace of customary activity” is replaced by “the ‘real time’ of interactivity” (Virilio

1999, 69), which requires a different type of self: one that never sleeps, is “alwayson,” and remains ever vigilant—a telepresent amplified self

Examples of virtual twinning abound in contemporary popular culture since

tech-niques such as split screen shots, e.g., Dead Ringers (1988, director David nenberg) and digital facial cloning in The Polar Express (2004, director Robert

Cro-Zemeckis), are used in filmmaking to turn real actors into standby doubles Through

“performance capturing” techniques, the movements of real actors are captured andtransposed onto digital clones.17

This technique is pushed to its extreme in the recent TV series Orphan Black

(2013, director John Fawcett) in which the main protagonist Sarah Manning (played

by Tatiana Maslany) meets several cloned versions of herself The same duplicityoccurs online through avatar personas created by users of the Massively Multiplayer

Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), Second Life, for instance Evidently the

amplified self is not merely a copy of the original but expands beyond the reachand limitations of the offline self, as Procter notes, “Avatars are distinct selves, notjust conduits for offline identities” (Procter 2014) A similar alter ego venture is

detectable in artists Matthieu Cherubini’s rep-licants-org web service that allows

one to create an artificial intelligence or bot on social media such as Facebook orTwitter.18The bot interacts on the account holder’s behalf According to Cherubini,

The bot does not born [sic] with a fictitious identity, but will be added to the real identity

of the user to modify it at his convenience Thus, this bot can be seen as a virtual prosthesis added to a user’s account, with the aim to build him a greater social reputation Moreover, this bot can be perceived as a threat by defrauding even more the reality of who is really who

on the cyberspace and by showing the poverty of our social interactions on these so-called

social networks (rep-licants-org website).

The feedback of users making use of rep-licants-org’s supply of virtual doubles

is quite startling: such as instances of the real self that becomes confused about whoactually send a message: him or the bot? Or in another case the real self actually starts

a conversation with his bot double In this sense, the bot double has indeed become

an externalized self that reflects or mirrors the original self In fact, Cherubini’s botshave become distinct being by documented their conversations with unknowing userscalling it bot’s diary.19

It is, however, the development of programmed digital personae such as Project

Lifelike and Virtual Eternity that interests me most These digital lookalikes simulate

presence by interacting with others online in the place of the absent person Thus, theonline persona not only looks like the person but now acts on behalf of the person

In this sense the online persona no longer represents but rather presents the self For

instance, Project LifeLike is a collaborative research project to create a more natural

computer interface in the form of a virtual human (Fig.1.3).20

17 Digital Cloning describes the process of capturing an actor’s performance and optionally their likeness in a digital model The captured performance can be used as a virtual stunt double, or mapped to a physically distinct character such as a child or animal.

18 For more information visit the project’s website: http://mchrbn.net/rep-licants-org, Accessed 14 June 2015 See also Cherubini (2011).

19Other examples are MyCyberTwin that “enables organizations to provide web-based sales and

support service 24 hours a day by using of sophisticated artificial intelligence technology embodied

in software-based robots called CyberTwins” (http://www.mycybertwin.com, accessed 16 June 2014).

20According to their website Project LifeLike “is collaborative research project funded by National

Science Foundation in the USA from 2007 It aims to create more natural computer interface in the form of a virtual human A user can talk to an avatar to manipulate accompanying external application

Fig 1.3 Alex Schwarzkopf and his virtual double from Project Lifelike website, 2013, (http:// www.sjameslee.com/project/project-lifelike/) With kind permission of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and University of Central Florida

One of the first interfaces is the avatar “Alex” who is the digital double of AlexSchwarzkopf, a former director of the National Science Foundation, USA Alex isintroduced as follows:

Right now cyber Alex only comes alive when he is turned on; but down the road, he’ll be like the old Max Headroom living online 24/7, standing in for the real Alex and even appearing several places at once […] Avatar Alex combines CG realism with just enough artificial smarts to pick-up verbal and nonverbal cues In other words, he just doesn’t speak—he

converses (Project LifeLike website).

Alex—the double—is not only a dummy that speaks he can seamlessly respondand engage with his audience The most astonishing claim made by the project is thepromise of immortality The project packages its new tribe of alter egos as “immortalavatars” who may one day be “speaking to future generations about the times of the

twenty-first century” (Project LifeLike website) The alter ego will thus outlive the

original and find an existence beyond the confinements of the real self who wouldsoon become just a relic of the past.21

In fact, an immortal alter ego is what the Virtual Eternity project promises, by

offering participants the opportunity to create an eternal avatar before death strikes.22But what would it be like to meet and chat with a deceased loved one online?Would this encounter be uncanny? The meeting with the double has been identi-fied as an uncanny experience by Freud, with some premonition perhaps of ourfuture engagements with our virtual doubles (Vardoulakis2006) The place where

(Footnote 20 continued)

or retrieve specific domain knowledge Project LifeLike, a collaboration between the Intelligent

Systems Laboratory at the University of Central Florida and the Electronic Visualisation Laboratory

at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is an attempt to create an avatar that completely supplants the physical form of the individual, for remote interaction both in virtual reality and physical space” (http://www.virtualworldlets.net/Resources/Hosted/Resource.php?Name=ProjectLifeLike, accessed 21 October 2015).

21 This has definite moral and legal implications See in this regard Smith (2013).

22 The Virtual Eternity Program, created by Intellitar, “gives family members the chance to create their very own Avatar—yes, an avatar—which will act like a time capsule for the future generations

we are most likely to meet our doubles is in the digital domain or the “UncannyValley,”23where that which is familiar, perhaps too familiar, becomes strange Theroboticist Masahiro Mori identified the moment when a robot (or virtual double inthis case) becomes too human as also precisely when it appears strange to us Thisphenomenon was dubbed the Uncanny Valley But as audiences become more andmore sophisticated and exposed to new technologies that limit shifts This is termedthe “Uncanny Wall” (Tinwell et al2011, 327) indicating that “viewers’ continuallyimproving discernment of the technical trickery used in the character’s creation; thisdiscernment prevents complete believability in the human-likeness of that charac-ter.” In other words, as technologies develop we develop with it and we intuit thedifference between the real self and the virtual double Interestingly enough Moriassociated “corpses, zombies and lifelike prosthetic hands” (Tinwell et al2011, 327)

as examples of the Uncanny Valley Upon encountering a deceased friend’s avatar(dare I say corpse?), will we not be thrown consistently into the chasm of familiarityand strangeness? Will the “dead ringer” of the deceased console or upset? There may,however, come a time when these two collide and the difference is no longer obvious

or important At that point, the virtual double will no longer merely represent theself but will become the present self

Conclusion

In the discussion that started with the selfie as a symptom of current engagementswith technologies, it has become obvious that the selfie confirms both strands of self-amputation and self-affirmation The overwhelming tendency to interpret selfies interms of narcissism is vindicated by the self-affirmative elements of the perpetuatingproject to capture oneself digitally On the other hand, the more unconscious process

of the self that is subsumed and numbed by technology becomes just as apparent Boththese processes of creating selfies give birth to the appearance of digital doubles In thecase of the self-affirmative double the cloned self takes on the form of a virtual avatarthat promises to present the self even after its demise In contrast, the amputated selftakes form in shadow like debris that follows the online self wherever and whenever

it shares data about itself This data is also said to live forever

(Footnote 22 continued)

of your family While you are alive and well, you can manipulate your Avatar to be as much like you as possible—Personality traits, looks, and conversation styles Then, after you pass, members

of your family can get access to your avatar clone and converse with it as if it were you This service

is digitally preserving your essence and allowing family to interact with past members Imagine signing on to the computer and listening to your grandparents tell you stories of the past as if they were still here Creepy …yet fascinating! Check it out & start creating your own digital legacy!” (https://www.virtualeternity.com, accessed 18 April 2014).

23 Note that Mori did not refer to valley in terms of a geographical place but rather to the curve on the graph.

What transpires from this analysis of the two-faced digital self is the definite shiftfrom representative media and technologies toward presentative structures Marshall(2010, 38) draws a distinction between “representational culture” that is replaced

by “presentational culture” as the selves created online are more presentative in

nature because the illusion is created that the online self is closer to the real selfthan other former representations It is premised that we are moving from self-representation unfolding over time and place (duration), toward instantaneous pres-

ences that are available everywhere and always Clearly, the Data Doppelg ¨anger

(double as shadow) and the immortal avatar (double as alter ego) are examples ofselves that assure longevity beyond the fragility of the embodied self Whether this

is feasible, and even bearable is another question altogether Perhaps Dorian Gray’ssad encounter with his ever-present double provides some pointers?

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Beuys Don’t Cry: From Social Sculptures

to Social Media

Alexander von Lünen

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at its shameless reveling in the joy of imitation, now placed under taboo, while the power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished

by imitation.

(Adorno, 1978, 225–226)

Abstract This paper looks at the art and philosophy of German fluxus artist Joseph

Beuys (1921–1986) and relates this to current debates in the Digital Arts and ities Beuys coined a number of grassroots concepts, such as the “social sculpture.”With this he referred to (a) the potential of art to transform society, (b) art as a socialproduct, i.e., sculptures in which the onlookers are part of the artwork, and (c) thepotential of every person to be an artist His often misconstrued punchline of “every-one is an artist” is an extension of Marcel Duchamps’ “Ready Made” art, in whichanything can be art; i.e., what Beuys proposed was rather that “anyone can be anartist.” This chapter looks at the similarities between Beuys’ work and Social Mediaand Digital Humanities, in how far his concept of the ‘Social Sculpture’ can informthe two

Human-Keywords History and philosophy of art·Fluxus·Phenomenology of space andtime·Digital humanities

Introduction

The crowd was furious What was this self-styled shaman thinking, destroyingcentury-old art? Well, a replication of the same, anyway Insults were flying throughthe air in front of Kassel’s Museum Fridericianum, where Joseph Beuys made aspectacle, of what he called the “extended concept of art.”

A von Lünen (B)

University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK

e-mail: a.f.vonlunen@hud.ac.uk

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

C Travis and A von Lünen (eds.) The Digital Arts and Humanities,

Springer Geography, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40953-5_2

23

This so-called ‘artist’ has made a name for himself chiefly by courting controversy

on a regular basis His step into the limelight came at an exhibition—or shall we say,

a performance?—the Festival of New Art at the Technical University in Aachen in

1964 A paint bucket he had used in this performance had spilled over and drops

of paint landed on the shoes of one of the right-wing students who were criticallyaccompanying the advertised art performance Needless to say, this was the sparkthose students had been waiting for A scuffle ensued in which Beuys got punched

in the face; the photo of him with a bloody nose holding his sculpture (a modifiedcrucifix) in one hand, giving a Hitler salute with the other, went—as it would becalled nowadays—‘viral’ (Joachimides and Rosenthal1974, 17; Verwoert2008)

So now Beuys was at it again While protesters were shouting at him he kept goingmelting the replica of the crown of Ivan the Terrible.1All the while he was chantingthe names of legendary alchemists Because that was what he saw himself like: thegreat transformer; just as Athanasius Kircher tried to turn lead into gold, so Beuysthe anthroposophist wanted to transform humans to a higher form of being That was,after all, his mission: to use art to transform society into something better In this, hisroots in Fluxus art were quite visible Fluxus was a response to the loss of authority

in postmodern societies The artist should no longer be the lone genius as sole creator

of an artwork, but art should be understood as a social product Fluxus artists likeYoko Ono had already anticipated this with her unfinished art pieces, which she thenleft for the audience to complete through interaction, such as Painting to Hammer aNail In presented in New York City in 1961 in which Ono hung up a white woodenboard with a hammer chained to it and a box of nails beside it, inviting visitors tohammer a nail into (Fig.2.1; cf Hendricks2013, 53; Cherix2015, 16)

Art and Authority

With this, Fluxus departed from earlier art schools such as Dada—although Fluxus

is often referred to as “Neo-Dada”—in that it went one step further than the works ofKurt Schwitters or later Marcel Duchamps’ Ready-Mades: for Duchamps’ messagewas that anything can be art, but the congenial act of selecting a piece to be art stilllaid with the single artist; in Fluxus and more prominently in Beuys’ work, anyonecould be an artist A single artist could no longer dictate what an audience would have

to deem art or not, but was just a provider of possible artworks that an audience thenparticipates to complete Art thus is no longer an individual act, but a democratic,participatory one (Weinhart2009, 56)

This is a situation similar to history and other humanities subjects since the 1990s.The World Wide Web (WWW) has challenged the authority of historians Wheremovements such as microhistory in the 1970s challenged what can be history, theInternet now challenged who can be a historian Microhistory in this regard resembledDuchamps’ Ready-Mades: anything can be art Microhistory challenged the notion

1 See https://youtu.be/t2j-579VznQ (accessed 03 Feb 2016) for a video of the performance.

Fig 2.1 Yoko Ono’s Painting To Hammer a Nail In, originally from 1961, here at the ‘War Is Over’

exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), 15 Nov 2013 to 23 Feb 2014.

Source Eva Rinaldi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

that only “great men” can be the subject of historic inquiry, but put the focus on thoseusually ignored: the “little people,” the outsiders; i.e., anything can be history, notonly Queens, Kings, Generals, etc.2 Likewise, just as Beuys postulated “everyone

an artist”, the rise of the WWW in the 1990s gave way to “everyone a historian”

It challenged the gatekeepers, it challenged the authority of historical scholarship

“enshrined by institutions and publication venues” (Hitchcock2008, 81) As a matter

of fact, that’s why some historians attacked the WWW in the 1990s (while othersembraced it):

Like post-modernism, the Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral [ ] Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is ‘privileged’ over any other (Himmelfarb 1996).

Now, Gertrude Himmelfarb was concerned about the lack of learning among herstudents facilitated by browsing for sound bites rather than reflective reading Yet, it

is easy to see the implications for the wider field of authority in historical scholarship

2 As German playwright Bertolt Brecht already wrote in 1935: “The young Alexander conquered India./Was he alone?/Caesar beat the Gauls./Did he not have even a cook with him?” (Willett and Manheim 1976, 252) Similar challenges haven been made, and are currently underway, in the field of neogeography, which is the topic of the chapters in part IV Wood (2006, 10) argues along similar lines when talking about map artists: “Map artists do not reject maps They reject the authority claimed by normative maps uniquely to portray reality as it is, that is, with dispassion and objectivity [ ]” (cf Harmon 2009, 13).

As Hitchcock pointed out, the authority of such scholarship was ring fenced bytradition—the academe and academic publishing Surely, one could argue that thechange in attitudes was not so great Publication venues may have been altered, butthe discursive frameworks are still set by academic historians ‘Hobby’ historiansand the latter still don’t mix much, and the former found their venues even beforethe dawn of the WWW Despicable histories, such as Holocaust denial, found theiroutlet before and there is little evidence that online publishing has made the situationworse—only more visible.

Indeed, many academics were perhaps more worried what the Internet would meanfor their own careers Many faculties still have issues acknowledging online projects

as publications worthy of taking into account for a decision on tenure The AmericanHistorical Association (AHA) has recently published guidelines for universities onhow to approach digital history,3and at the AHA 2016 meeting it was discussed toview digital scholarship as performances, just like Arts and Drama schools evaluateperformances of their staff members

And it is about time to recognize that digital humanities is indeed more about formance than results Until now, digital humanities have lived off their potential—it

per-is thper-is potential that justifies the term at all for the time being, as the digital humanitieshave fairly little to show for in terms of revolutionary insights in the humanities thatwould have not been possible had it not been for computers So far, the digital human-ities are about an approach, not a state (Schmale2010, 37) Digital Humanities arethus about a performance that leaves the impression of further potential—potentialfor more digital humanities research required, or the potential for useful data to beexploited by someone else

Just as Fluxus, and Beuys in particular, have attempted to construct their artworks—unfinished works that interact with its audience to be completed It is nocoincidence that the anti-authoritarian Fluxus movement gained traction at a timewhen established holders of authority and control were increasingly coming underscrutiny While the anti-authoritarian art movements of the 1920s and 1930s suc-cumbed to the totalitarian backlash (Hitlerism, Stalinism), the 1960s saw a wave ofmovements questioning power relations

Art as a Reaction to Technical Change

This struggle over authority is not new, however, but has been a companion—if not itsepitome—of modernity Instrumental in this challenge to authority was technology.The industrialization of the Western world and its impact on society in the nineteenthcentury found a number of commentators, such as Karl Marx or Charles Dickens.4

3 scholarship-in-history/guidelines-for-the-evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-in-history, June 2015 (last accessed: 22 Feb 2016).

http://historians.org/teaching-and-learning/digital-history-resources/evaluation-of-digital-4 Wagner (1998), among others, gives a good overview of intellectuals and their reaction to the

“Question of Technology.”

To most contemporaries, technological and scientific change meant some sort ofloss For workers, it meant loss of their traditional roles and family structures; forintellectuals it meant the breakup of feudal structures and thus of a loss of authority.This, in the eyes of thinkers such as Kierkegaard or Nietzsche—and later Heidegger—results in a feeling of alienation and indifference (Dreyfus2006).5Not only wouldthis result in a loss of meaning in the West as Habermas (1976) evinced, but it inturn would also create a sense of loss of security It is not surprising that the politicalturmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe coincided with revolutionary scientificbreakthroughs (relativity theory, quantum physics, etc.), and that art consequentlyvisualizes this turmoil about security and assertions of authority and traditions Wroteart theorist Ferdnand Léger in 1914:

A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth century artist; so much so that our language, for example, is full of diminutives and abbreviations The compression of the modern picture, its variety, its breaking up of forms, are the result

of all of this It is certain that the evolution of the means of locomotion and their speed have

a great deal to do with the new way of seeing (Léger 1973, 11–12)

Modern art styles, such as Expressionism or Cubism, represented this “new way ofseeing.” The “breaking up of forms” in the paintings Léger spoke about reflected thebreaking up of forms in real life Similarly, participatory art in the 1960s reflectedthe desire for diplomacy and conciliatory politics in the age of the Cold War andthe threat of nuclear annihilation Having witnessed the devastation of the SecondWorld War, caused by a dictatorial regime, the hopes for the pacifying power ofdirect democracy and participatory politics translated into ambitions of democraticand participatory art

But there was another technology beside the nuclear bomb and nuclear powerthat started to have an impact on the contemporary mind, and which was likewise

a child of the cold war: the computer The Cold War necessitated control; controlover machines and resources, as much as control over humans (Edwards 1996).Again, it is no coincidence that a political debate would coincide with scientificdebates—cybernetics and information theory—that permeated into all layers of con-temporary society The computer became a popular metaphor used in all sciences,such as psychology (Halpern2014) To be scientific meant—and still means—to becomputerized The Digital Humanities are a response and reflection of this notion.6

As soon as computers appeared in universities on a larger scale in the 1960s wouldhumanists engage with this challenge.7

This urge to computerize science—and consequently society— found its critics,obviously Philosopher Edmund Husserl called mathematics the “garb of ideas” ofscience, in which mathematics is used to “dress up” mere methods as “true being”

5 Indeed, Karl Marx, too, has written about alienation in labor to describe the loss of control of the worker over his or her labor: “in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself” (Marx 1974, 66).

6 See Lünen (2016) for a debate of this notion Although that paper is about history and GIS, a lot

of observations in it hold true for the digital humanities more generally speaking.

7 See Bullough (1966/67) or Masterman (1962) for such early encounters.

of scientific inquiry (Husserl1970, 51) And his former student Martin Heideggercoined the term “Enframing” to describe the revelatory potential of technology andits limiting nature alike (Heidegger 1977) Technology, for Heidegger, is a mode

of revealing, i.e., it lets one access nature in a way hitherto impossible, for ple through laboratory equipment Yet, technology also transforms the knowledge

exam-so produced into a “standing-reserve”, i.e., into a mere reexam-source that rids othersfrom the tedious process of knowledge production Knowledge about the world thusbecomes a commodity to be consumed by those not involved in the actual research.Heidegger, although a reactionary who idolized the hardship of manual labor, didnot condemn technology outright, but just the consumerist attitude it would evokeand the uniformity it enforces (Dreyfus2006, 359).8

An important point in Heidegger (1977), on the other hand, is once again that oftime Because technology transforms knowledge into a resource, it saves its consumertime Just as in his other works, Heidegger identified time and its experience asthe defining characteristic of modernity Maybe the biggest change that modernitybrought about was the change of temporal experiences, and, in its wake, that of spatialexperiences

We Are Reading Time in Space

As already mentioned, changes in society induced by science and technology effectedchanges in art and art production Art from the 1960s onwards became increasinglyparticipatory, challenging the notion of the artist as solitary genius This is a departure

in more than one way Art used to be a quite top–down process until the early twentiethcentury Art was paid for, curated and admired by a few; the general audience was toldwhat art was and what they are supposed to accept as proper art Yet, the technicalage of the radio, the automobile and the airplane changed all of this As MartinHeidegger noted in his main work Being and Time (1927), human life is determinedpredominantly by time, not by space Space is given meaning only through time

If we had infinite time at our disposal, distance—i.e., space—would lose all itssignificance.9While time is still the limiting factor of human experience, technologyhas altered our sense of time and, consequently, that of space Distances on Earthhave lost a lot of their antagonism, because it is possible (and affordable) to overcomethem in a comparably short amount of time—be it physically through budget flights

or via teleconferencing

It was this “annihilation of time” through technology that nineteenth centuryauthors already wrote about in light of the steam engine powered trains and ships.With a world increasingly on the move, in an increased state of flux, old wisdoms

8 It is interesting to note that Heidegger saw art as an escape route to this computerization and technicity of life Art would help to break this enframing and purchase “the dynamic of the poetic nature of our existence.” (Froman 1993, 346).

9 See more on Heidegger, math, time and GIS in Lünen (2016).

were likewise increasingly questioned With a world in flux—rapid technical andscientific innovations, showing their potential for atrocities in World War 1 andthereby calling into question romantic notions of battle still prevalent at the time, allthe while empires came tumbling down in the wake of that war (Russian Empire,German Empire, Habsburg Empire)—the early twentieth century was a phase ofshock and awe for culture It is thus not too surprising that early twentieth century artwas therefore equally trying to shock its audience, sometimes by praising technologyfor its lethal potential as the Futurists did,10 or alluding to the perceived chaos byembracing the very same as the Dadaists did.11Others, such as Russian avant-gardistKasimir Malevich,12argued that modern science and modern art are on the same pagewith their potential to destroy the laws and boundaries of tradition: “Science and arthave no boundaries because what is comprehended infinitely is innumerable andinfinity and innumerability are equal to nothing.” (Malevich1968, 224).

Yet it was not the steam engine or the aeroplane—or the computer for that matter—that had the most profound impact on life and its temporality, but the clock SaidLewis Mumford:

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key of the modern industrial age For every phase

of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous […] The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world

of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science (Mumford 1967, 14–15)

This brings us back to the point discussed above, that industrialization challengedthe perception of time This, however, not only through shorter traveling time forindividuals, but more strongly through the need of synchronized economic activities,

of “correlation of activities over larger geographical areas [which] demanded a tem where local times were substituted for standardized ones” (Lundmark1993, 58).This is what Heidegger and others are referring to when they speak about technology:not technical artifacts, but rather technological systems—systems, i.e., standardiza-tions and formalizations, mandated by technology The individual automobile is atechnical artifact, but the automobile as technology is a system: factories to producethem, dealers to sell them, gas stations to fuel them, garages to maintain them, roadworks to provide space for them, etc What Mumford thus criticizes is not the clock

sys-as artifact, but the uniformity of social experience it facilitates, i.e., the control thatthe system of ‘the clock’ exerts on individuals

10 “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.” As the Futurist manifesto heralded it (Harrison and Wood 2003, 147).

11 “Life appears as a simultaneous muddle of noises, colors and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified into Dadaist art, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality.” From the Dadaist manifesto (Harrison and Wood 2003, 258).

12 There is an argument to be had about Malevich’s nationality Born in the Ukraine to parents who were members of the Polish minority, Kasimir Malevich spent most of his adult life in Russia and is nowadays regarded as the standard bearer of the Russian avant-garde Cf Borchardt-Hume (2014).