DoppelGängerArmy of One
One visitor at a time stands before a small mob of robots. Each copies them — but not quite. Each has its own temperament.
I — The workConcept
DoppelGänger is an exploration of the dynamic link between virtual and physical identity, staged through kinetic interaction between a person and a group of robots. A single member of the audience steps in front of their own mirroring mini-mob and begins to discover their many faces: every robot follows the visitor's movement, but each one manifests a different behavioural pattern — eager, hesitant, contrary, late — as though a single personality had been split into variations of itself.
Playing with the ensemble, the visitor tests the identity, abilities and limits of each robot as an individual and of the group as a whole. What begins as a game of mirroring becomes a feedback loop in which human and robot, physical and virtual, preconditioned and spontaneous, perform together in chaotic harmony.
II — DocumentationPlates
III — The storyMaking & meaning
The idea came from a simple observation about life online: the digital sphere has stretched the borders of identity. Each of us now maintains several selves at once — profiles, avatars, voices tuned to different audiences — and each of them behaves a little differently from the body that animates it. We wanted to make that multiplicity physical, to let someone stand in a room and literally face their own crowd.
The work first existed as a sentence and a promise. Years before Dublin we announced it on our studio website as "a nine-robot installation" we were working towards, and began building prototypes, asking how slight delays, exaggerations and refusals in movement might read as character rather than error. That research became our submission to Google's DevArt programme.
In 2017 Science Gallery Dublin invited DoppelGänger into HUMANS NEED NOT APPLY, an exhibition about automation and the future of human work. Installing the ensemble in Dublin turned the question around: in a show about machines replacing people, here was a group of machines that could do nothing at all without a person — an army of one.