I Am You, 2024
An interactive audiovisual installation that explores the relationship between perception, identity, and hyperreality through an AI-driven digital kaleidoscope.
Synopsis
Upon entering the darkened space, visitors are confronted with a large-scale kaleidoscopic projection generated in real time from their own image. As participants move through the installation, a camera continuously captures their presence, transforming fragments of their bodies into endlessly shifting symmetrical compositions. The installation dissolves the distinction between self and image, producing a constantly evolving visual environment where the familiar becomes abstract and detached from its physical origin.
The experience is accompanied by an AI-generated soundscape that analyses the visual output and continuously generates an evolving sonic composition. Image and sound become inseparable, creating an immersive environment in which visitors simultaneously become the subject, the material, and the observer of the artwork.
Narrative
The mesmerising patterns of a kaleidoscope can draw the viewer away from the real world, creating a preference for the hyperreal experience inside the kaleidoscope over the ordinary reality outside it.
I Am You investigates how contemporary technologies reshape our perception of reality and identity. Inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and hyperreality, the installation questions the reliability of visual representation in a world increasingly mediated by digital systems and artificial intelligence.
The kaleidoscope functions as both a metaphor and a technological mechanism. Although every visual pattern originates from the participant’s body, the resulting image quickly loses any recognisable connection to its source. Through endless reflection, repetition, and algorithmic transformation, the participant becomes an image without an original—a simulacrum existing independently of physical reality.
Rather than reproducing reality, the installation constructs a new one. The symmetrical patterns often appear more harmonious, vibrant, and visually compelling than the person standing before the camera. The digital representation becomes aesthetically preferable to its source, inviting viewers to question whether contemporary experience increasingly privileges simulation over reality.
Artificial intelligence extends this process into the auditory realm. Rather than merely accompanying the visuals, the AI continuously interprets their movement, colour, and complexity, producing a responsive soundscape that evolves alongside the projection. The installation therefore establishes a feedback loop between visitor, machine, image, and sound, dissolving conventional distinctions between observer and observed, author and system.
The title I Am You reflects this shifting relationship between identity and representation. The participant encounters not a mirror, but a technologically reconstructed version of themselves—a digital presence that is simultaneously familiar and alien. The installation asks whether identity remains stable once it is filtered through systems that continuously transform, replicate, and reinterpret human presence.
Technical
The installation consists of a computer running TouchDesigner, a digital camera, a video projector, a projection surface, an audio system, and the necessary signal distribution hardware to connect all devices.