Cell


Cell is an interactive installation commissioned for the Alpha-Ville festival, a collaboration between James Alliban and Keiichi Matsuda. It plays with the notion of the commodification of identity by mirroring the visitors in the form of randomly assigned personalities mined from online profiles.

It aims to get the visitors thinking about the way in which we use social media to fabricate our second selves, and how these constructed personae define and enmesh us. As users enter the space they are assigned a random identity.

Over time, tags floating in the cloud begin to move towards and stick to the users until they are represented entirely as a tangled web of data seemingly bringing together our physical and digital selves.