Helium 05: The Hall of Mirrors

Since we entered the age of mechanical reproduction, we have been consistently subject to new kinds of unreality. From The Cottingley Fairies to the latest political battleground: audio deepfakes. Hoaxes are one thing, but there is something uniquely fascinating about the kind of modern tricks we play not only on others, but on ourselves.

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As Susie Orbach wrote in 2019, “the terrain of the body is changing”. And nowhere more profoundly does this sentiment apply than to our digital selves. 

Cosmetics are (literally) ancient, but even photoshop or the latest in injectables seem quaint when compared with the creation of the completely fictive digital versions of ourselves that many of us choose - or feel we are expected - to create. "I guess what’s interesting about these fictive bodies", says Orbach, “is that when I see 20- or 30-year-olds they don’t look like that, so they’re managing two bodies: the body for broadcast and then the body in trainers and jogging pants without all the contouring… It’s deception as a performance, we can all be a star.”

It makes sense. The ability to carve out new digital identities for ourselves squares with the common psychological wish “to get rid of the parts of ourselves we feel ashamed of, or hate, or don’t want to acknowledge.”

The internet has given us myriad new ways to be seen and judged by others, and therefore is it any wonder we want to battle the hell of being perceived by creating idealized versions of ourselves?

The idealization of the digital self ought to concern us, however, as it dovetails with the imperative for a young person to create a ‘personal brand’, which these days can begin before they even have a chance to experiment with the untidy, non-linear process of getting to know themself.

As brand builders, we recognize another issue with distilling human beings into brands: brands are inherently reductive. Branding relies on a necessary process of distillation to a simple combination of easy-to-grasp characteristics that help people to understand a business quickly and easily. The risk in branding ourselves is that we become like Sims, summed up by “four total traits”: including options like "tough" vs. "feminine" which, for the Sims, are seen as mutually exclusive.

As powerful a tool as social media can be for some, the great majority of us don’t need to be a brand, and in trying to become one we’re simply performing unpaid labor for the shareholders at Meta. As an anonymous entry on Delia Cai’s Deez Links posits: “Lighten up. You’re a person, not a brand. You might think by drinking the Kool-Aid that you’re standing on business, but in fact, the business is standing on you.”

Naomi Klein’s book suggests that “personal branding, amplified by the growing desire to curate a unique digital self, entrenches fixed and phony selves and stands in the way of forming alliances with others, and indeed, we can clearly trace ways in which “desirability politics” play out in social dynamics - where curation of the digital representation of our life starts to impact relationships in our IRL lives. 

Before long, we will be able to sideline the messy business of corporeal existence completely in favor of our optimized digital avatars. They not only stand in for us as the stars of our social media channels, but in Web3, we will be able to live entire lives as them. Perhaps none of us should be surprised that according to The Virtual Reality Society,  "When it comes to haptic technology—the technology of simulating touch—the adult industry is a key innovator”.

Whatever floats your boat, but at Hugo & Marie what most intrigues us are the ways in which the digital selves we create can alter, reframe, or expand how we understand our personhood IRL.

"The growing role of the virtual in our lives… from Apple’s Vision Pro to wearables and Elon Musk’s Neuralink… means the boundaries between virtual and material are becoming smoother and increasingly blurry. Even the way we interact with representations of ourselves online – through avatars, emojis, face filters – is shaping how we perceive ourselves as no longer just human, but better resembles videogame characters trying on different skins in the shape of online trends or exploring virtual worlds through social media and VR."

The study I Found a More Attractive Deepfaked Self: The Self-Enhancement Effect in Deepfake Video Exposure by researchers at Tsinghua University merely scratches the surface of how AI might be used to treat body image disturbances, a notoriously difficult category of mental ill-health to treat with traditional talking therapy or medication.

And in Lucy Sante’s recent memoir, she describes movingly the way in which the use of the simple and easily accessible FaceApp finally allowed her to get her arms around the transgender identity she had tried to subjugate all her life. What possibilities, then, are afforded to us by the proliferation of easy ways to manipulate images of the self? What can be found beyond simple gimmicks or vanity? 

As brands experiment with new technological frontiers, rather than simply helping us to cleave more closely to the tyranny of old beauty standards or social edicts, we should consider the novel ways in which they can allow us to play, explore and expand our sense of selves. Who knows what we might discover.

Aidan Larned (Strategist) and Michael Whitham (Creative)