ID/entity: Portraits in the 21st Century
Strangers to Ourselves
2001 MIT Media Lab

Edith K. Ackermann
"mon nom est personne"
lives and works anywhere

Kelly Dobson
born 1970
lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Steven L. Smith
born 1954
lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Holographic Installation: http://identity.media.mit.edu/strangers.html

An invisible, ever-changing apparatus guides the making of personal identity. There is no such thing as a being; only projections, interpretations, idealized memories, idolized constructions. A person exists through auto-recollections, and surrounds herself with self-defining tokens. A pulsed laser hologram takes hours to set up but only six nanoseconds to shoot—a portrait capturing self-conscious poses while revealing details more minute than could ever be planned. Through the gathering of surveillance data, we leave ever more coherent sets of traces. Unknowingly. Digital voyeurism. How do we respond to these unsolicited incursions?