experimental film, polaroids, photographs
2021/22

The trinity in the title basically says it all: that identity in the digital age, especially under corresponding image production and reproduction processes, is subject to an incessant multiplication. Or to put it another way: that the ego, one can also call it the "digital subject", is now subject to a technologically fueled tendency to split, which is nevertheless shrouded in a cloudy illusion of unity.

Claudia Larcher's "Me, Myself and I" does nothing less than bring this splintering and simultaneous re-synthesizing moment into productive collision with each other. The experimental set-up for this is as simple as it is captivating: Larcher has fed a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) with 350 photographs of herself (up to the age of 24), resulting in a continuously deforming flow of images that contain even more views of identity beyond the original photos. Baby face, girl's head, young woman, almost forward into old age and back to toddler-like again - all this in a constantly morphing stream that imperceptibly allows one thing to merge into the next. A digitally mediated becoming is thus staged, which indicates both a productive disappearance and a constant re-creation - the deletion of all that has gone before, even to the point of complete abstraction, with simultaneous reconstitution and anticipation of what is yet to come. Grotesque deformation meets grimacing refocusing, organic-synthetic-hybrid, with repeated flashes of laughable facial comedy, familiar from Snapchat and other image editing filters.

That none of this is based on a master narrative of any kind, about what AI can or possibly wants, is evidenced by the soundtrack. Here, Larcher has processed dialogues that she has conducted with various chatbots about identity into a script that interconnects fragments of ego perception in a multidirectional way. The "reflexive self-reference" that is repeatedly addressed as the core of every identity is possibly itself no more than a placeholder for a multiplicity that cannot be kept in check. Or for the edge of non-existence, which expresses itself just as beguilingly in the lively scraps of portraits delirious before them.

text by Christian Höller