Amber:What is your aim with your art work?
Alexa:The work plays on the Lacanian idea that ‘ideal-other’ in the mirror, is and is not the self. Alter Ego questions the predictability of the machine as a tool and measuring device, and the character of the user’s relationship with it. Superficially, the success or failure of Alter Ego as an interactive work relies on the ability of the machine to measure and to analyse the dynamic human face mathematically and logically, but the work also draws our attention to the inadequacy of measurement alone to interpret the emotional state reflected in a person’s face. For the user, Alter Ego introduces a sense of rupture between the observed self and the experienced self and points up the inseparability of human and machine; of conscious actions and affective responses.

Amber:How does your project works?
Alexa:Alter Ego is an interactive installation in which the user sits in front of what appears to be a mirror on a wall. By making a range of facial expressions in front of the ‘mirror’, the individual user can interact with his or her own avatar. When the user sits still in front of the ‘mirror’ the computer captures images of his or her face via a webcam located behind the ‘mirror’. Alter Ego is fully automatic – requiring no intervention by the user. Initially the subject’s (virtual) face is reflected on the screen and the avatar mimics his or her expressions. After about thirty seconds the reflection begins to react to, rather than mirror, the facial expressions of the user. For example: if the user smiles, the virtual face, or ‘alter ego’, may look surprised or angry, or may smile back.

Amber:Could you describe your process of creation?
Alexa:The creation of this work took a long time and involved a lot of (scientific) research. Alter Ego was made over a period of five years (from 2000-2005), during which time I collaborated with a scientist (Alf Linney, Professor of Medical Physics at UCL, London) and employed a programmer to research and write some innovative software. I spent time researching the facial expression of emotion – videoing people making facial expressions, both involuntarily and to order, and then classifying and categorising those expressions to form a database of hundreds of different faces making the same ten expressions. Using some commercial tracking software which tracks twenty two points on the face we then trained our system to recognise these ten different expressions on any face. We also had to develop a new way of classifying expressions that was more robust than any other that was available at the time (although it is still not perfect), and we had to find a way of automatically creating an avatar of the individual user in a very short time (under 30 seconds), which again no one else could do at that time. Then I worked with a 3D modeller to make a series of morph targets that enable the avatar to mimic the user’s expressions. At first I was hoping that we would be able to make the expressions more particular – more like those of each individual user, but this was impossible. In the end, though, this failure of the machine to completely reproduce a mirror image of the user is interesting.

Amber: How long have you been producing digital art?
Alexa: Around ten years, although I started working with digitally manipulated photography before that.

Amber: What made you choose digital media as medium?
Alexa: I am interested in interactivity and in the role of the audience in relation to the work. I am interested in what digital media can tell us about us as humans. Although I don’t particularly like working with new media, I like the sense of magic and wonder we can create with these new and emerging technologies.

Amber: You’re working with datas and interfaces which are not as durable as classic materials like paint, marble etc.; what do you think of filing digital art to pass them on to the future generations?
Alexa: As my work is installation based this is not really relevant, although documentation of the work does exist (see: www.alteregoinstallation.co.uk) The work is experiential and so any documentation is only a method of recording the ideas and giving a general impression of the work.

Amber: Do you have aesthetic concerns while producing your art?
Alexa:Yes, of course. It is important that the user experience is an aesthetic one as this will (or might) seduce the audience into thinking about the work and thinking about the ideas it is dealing with. More specifically, I am interested in making work where the interface is as transparent as possible so that the experience of what is real and what is virtual becomes unclear.

Amber: What do you think of the interaction between technology and human?
Alexa:That is rather a broad question! It is a fact of modern life – we interact with technologies all the time. As I said above, I am only interested in using technologies as a tool to understand more about human-ness, not as an end in themselves. Alter Ego literally functions like a mirror, but a mirror in which something is wrong – the technology gives us an altered experience of ourselves.

Amber:Do you think technology leads to passivisation of its users? Are we interactive or interpassive? Why?

Alexa:That depends on the specific work. My works only function when the user interacts – otherwise nothing happens. The user completes the work and is, in a sense, the subject of the work – quite literally in the case of Alter Ego.

For more information about Alter Ego: http://www.alteregoinstallation.co.uk/