It's all too easy to tweak ourselves online. Changing to become closer to the way we wish others perceived us, only the most flattering pictures, falsely modest statuses and painstakingly crafted tweets make the cut. Although we may not mean to, we end up crafting a fictitious persona in the process. James Alliban and Keiichi Matsuda capture the bizarre translation from physical to digital self with their installation piece 'Cell.'
Using 4 Xbox Kinects, the work tracks viewers as they enter a room, projecting a cloud of descriptive identifiers on a virtual mirror that follows their movements. The descriptors were collected through the data mining of various social networking and online dating websites, projecting identifiers such as 'atheist', 'hipster' and 'meat-eater.' There are also other interests and states like 'ghostbusters', 'tattoo' and 'unnaturally high tolerance for alcohol.' The online tags form data clouds of fabricated personas which adhere to the viewers' movements and grow over time.
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