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Nakladnik Gestalten

Doppelganger: Images of the Human Being

The ongoing quest to capture the visual identity of the human being in our digital age.

Editors: R. Klanten, S. Ehmann, F. Schulze, Gestalten, 2011.

 

Doppelganger presents current trends in capturing the visual identity of human beings. Each of its seven chapters explores a different creative approach: Embody, Dissolve, Appeal, Reshape, Perform, Deform, and Escape. The book is a compelling and entertaining collection of groundbreaking permutations of the outer human shell created with costumes and masks as well as photo-technical and artistic manipulation. While inventing, enhancing, obscuring, or altering identities, the images play with and often obliterate classical proportions and visual traditions. In doing so, they reveal further possibilities for what can be considered beautiful and fashionable.

More About This Book

The digital age has fundamentally changed traditional notions of who we are and how we wish to be perceived. The music producer Chris Walla puts it this way: “Confronted with our significantly more banal everyday life, we’re measuring our actual selves against our online selves with hopeful resignation.”
Doppelganger presents current trends in the depiction of human beings. In today’s images and sculptures, personal identities are being intensified, altered, or created through the use of techniques such as deformation and construction/deconstruction as well as the obliteration of classical proportions, visual traditions, and what is generally considered beautiful and fashionable.
The book shows permutations of the outer human shell created with costumes and masks as well as photo-technical and artistic manipulation. These take their visual cues from such diverse aesthetics as Dada, surrealism, high tech, cutting-edge fashion design, and the folklore of other cultures. Masquerades and artificial characters are used imaginatively to enhance and obscure true identities.
With examples ranging from the intimate to the radical, Doppelganger explores how many or how few effects the depiction of a person can take in order to function as such. In doing so, the book shows that the unique visual appearances being created today often reveal more about the identities of their subjects and creators than their “real” faces ever could.

Levi van Veluw, Gravel, 2006

Matthieu Lavanchy

Anders Krisar, Mist Mother

Luis Dourado, Freddie is Dreaming

Ashkan Honarvar

Noil Klune Teatro Magazine

A pile of boxes in an Ikea aisle tilts to the side a little too sadly and gesturally. A lumpy pebble-encrusted oval has a slit of peony pink ear flesh shining through on one side; two blank sockets as eyes. The bottom of a man’s face melts into a pastel glop of sprinkles, ice cream, and sticky red sauce, a greedy bite cutting into the side of his head where his ear should be. All of these images are of humans; a peek of flesh, fingers, or shoes — even just a human-like silhouette — there to ascertain this. But what these images, and the rest of the artfully-curated images in Gestalten’s new release Doppelganger Images of the Human Being, do is question what exactly constitutes a human portrait in a time when what it means to be, and even look like, a human is up in the air. With science on the verge of allowing us to trade in our natural forms — like shabby old suitcases — for new, technologically-augmented forms, we have to wonder at what point we’ll cease being humans and start being objects. Indeed, it doesn’t take much au naturalness these days for something, anything, to be labeled a human. Prime example: GaGa who recently took to the red carpet in a giant white egg. “There’s Lady GaGa” commentators remarked, referring to the big white orb.
The artistic approach to the human form — a constant subject since the beginning of art itself — has been constantly reconfigured throughout history. According to the preface essay on Post-Digital Identity by Robert Klanten, the rendering of the human usually changes dramatically in times of technological upheaval. During the Renaissance, when science first began locking horns with religion, the human form and its every sinew, tendon, and muscle, was studied and drawn with exhaustive scientific precision. With the dawning of the Industrial Revolution, Cubism, and Futurism, the human form was fractured into geometric pieces and interchangeable parts. Now, in this so-called “post-digital” age where we are morphing into what we Tweet, post, and blog, traditional corporeality is becoming less and less relevant. This online identity is referred to by Robert Klanten in his preface essay as “the doppelganger.” It is an extension of self that may soon overtake the self as we know it; it lives and breathes in the digital realm and instead of blood has black and white 0s and 1s coursing through its veins. This doppelganger has the means to build empires, make friends, and influence people without any physical interaction — it’s an idealized and hyperbolized identity, free to grow without flesh as a limit. So how do we embody this doppleganger and capture its essence via art? This is the question that Doppelganger poses and seeks to answer.
Ranging from embellishment and reverse tromp l’oeil to sculpture and collage, the works in Doppelganger are creative expressions of the human during this time of uncertainty. The works seek to define what drives the modern day human emotionally, sexually, physically, and philosophically. Check out more pictures after the jump. — Marlo Kronberg