23
2007
Digital Children
Mike Marcus, a 34 year old photographer and digital artist,will soon open his Exogeny #1 exhibition. “Exogeny” referring to the cultural practice of intentionally breeding outside of one’s cultural or ethnic community.
Each of his images displays a digital child compromised of synthetic derivatives from two portraits. Each facial feature is neither from one or the other but a digital “genetic” synthesis of the two.
In Mike’s own words:
“This is the world we now live in. A world where both the virtual and physical are becoming equally real. Where relationships between people do not depend on physical presence or even the ability to speak the same language. Where ideas and concepts exist outside of the brain of the individual in the collective mind of society where we call them memes. It is a world where a digital child is a serious prospect. If people can have cyber sex then why not cyber offspring?”
Yaniv Golan, a social networking expert and one of Yedda‘s founders says:
“The concept of digital children is intriguing to us social-network-web-folks. Here is a different, albeit somewhat technical way to look at it: In a world where a lot of our interactions are online, where new relationships are formed in online social networks, where people create avatars and spend their life online in Second Life – it makes a lot of sense to explore the concept of digital children as yet another way to express my online life. Will people living virtual life and making virtual friends want to deepen the relationship and have a digital child with one of their digital friends? ….In fact, I could even imagine a service that lets two folks who have an online (and possibly also an offline) relationship submit their photos and ask the service to create a digital child for them, which they will then post on their profile as one further proof of their relationship.”
So what do you think? Do you see us evolving in this direction? How long will it be before we start living completely virtual lives? Will it all start with a new Facebook application that allows you to create digital children with your friends? And if such an application did come out, would you add it? You know you would…
Technorati tags: digital, photography, art, painting, exogeny, exhibition, digital children, breeding, virtual, yaniv golan, mike marcus, social networking, yedda, avatars, virtual world, second life, facebook
About the Author: Ayelet Noff
Ayelet Noff has over twelve years of experience marketing companies from various industries. She has been involved in the social media world before the term social media even existed. Ayelet opened Blonde 2.0 back in 2006. Before this, she was ICQ’s Marketing Manager for four years and also held various executive marketing positions in different startups. She is also a top blogger and currently writes for three different blogs: The Blonde 2.0 blog, The Next Web, and Socialmedia.biz. She holds an MBA degree from Tel Aviv University, and a BA in Politics from Brandeis University.
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Fascinating stuff for an artist / social networker to think about. Beyond that, I’d love to see an application that let us put photos of a group of people together to let us see what the collective “us” looks like.
Thanks for telling us about this!
Susan:
My pleasure. I find it fascinating as well. Regarding your “collective us” idea, that’s another idea for a facebook application
As the artist in question, I would love to see the develpoment of a facebook aplication. If anyone want to develop one with me, dont hesitate to get in touch.
The interesting thing is, will these virtual offspring be limited to just pixels or could they develop some sort of personality? Is it possible that these beings could somehow be infused with a discrete synthesis of both parents ideas and beleifs? Is memtic breeding online maybe the answer to the turin test?
Any of you who live in Tel Aiv, check out the in depth (and very conceptual) interview with me this friday in “Ha’ir”.
oops.. Of course I meant memetic breeding. Trust me to misspell the one word in the reply that might need to be looked up
Mike:
I would love to see such an application on Facebook. As you say, apart from the actual visual, it would be interesting to see if perhaps based on the tags people add to their profiles, the digital child could develop some sort of personality based on the “genetics” of the two members who created him.
or “memetics”
great blog! keep up the great work!