For graduation work I was very interested in online behaviour. I started making bots to automate this and I realized how incredibly easy it is to create interaction and build up a digital following. Running my script for a few days gave me around 500 twitter followers. I found this fascinating but I thought that the script was too simple. There is a big difference between interaction and interaction with meaning. But what was interesting is that it created a whole timeline of all the interactions it had. Nothing on the internet is lost. Archiving yourself has been a goal in humanity as long as we exist. The first artworks that we ever found were copies of people’s hands painted over in a cave. And tons of popular media have cloning as the main premise. So this project is in a way my attempt to archive a version of the twenty-four year old me, a digital clone that will exist after I am gone.

The first step was to create a voice. Which I did by reading my clone from the book Frankenstein. This was cut into small segments and then I trained a neural network (tacotron2) to speak like me. After training for about a month I had a semi-realistic voice that sounded exactly like me. I did a Turing test with some people and 50 percent of the time people couldn’t differentiate the fake voice from my actual voice.

The second part that needed to happen was creating a mind. What good would a clone be if it would just repeat whatever I said. So I started collecting random thoughts that I had over the day. After a month I had a nice database of things I could have said. Again I trained a neural network to create similar thoughts using GPT-2. GPT has a base layer of data that is based on the internet and I didnt realise this at first but it greatly impacted the output I got from my clone. It said things I would never have expected and by linking them I could hear myself say things I would never say myself.

The final level of my clone was the body. It needed some kind of vessel to contain all this data. Because this has so much personal data I was quite scared to upload my clone to the cloud. So I made a standalone machine where the clone lives(pic 4). This machine will never be updated and therefore become kind of a time capsule. This is the physical body of the clone. The digital body I made by 3d modeling a version of myself. completely rigged so it lip syncs to whatever it says. I even hired a virtual hairdresser to do my hair, because 3d modeling hair is super hard.

As soon as this whole system started running it quickly became quite surreal. I could type a message to myself and within a few seconds my clone would answer it. Sometimes purely nonsensical but sometimes there is a small hint of intelligence in the answers.

The work Core Computing was in collaboration with NXP semiconductors. Which is one of the biggest microchip manufacturers in the world. They unknowingly have a huge impact on the world, almost anything that uses electronics has some kind of NXP technology in it. Yet almost no one knows who they are and when talking to the experts and chip designers at NXP they barely realise the impact they had on society.

I had no idea what really happened inside the chip. I had used them for some projects but it was basically a tiny black box that needed some power and it would give an output. So I jumped into the rabbit hole of chip design. In the 70’s chip design used to be almost an artform. It was one person working weeks on a giant piece of paper drawing every single trace. This craft slowly disappeared with the increased size chip complexity and the ability to simulate everything. Even the experts told me that not really a single person designs a chip anymore. Its teams of hundreds of people and 60 percent of their time they are fixing compatibility problems. I found chip design as a craft fascinating and that’s what I tried to do. and when you zoom in you realise that chips are nothing more but transistors but into the right configuration. There are 3 logic blocks: AND gate, OR gate and a NOT gate and this is basically what every digital object on our planet is based on.

I found this quite incredible and wanted to make this visible. So I made this into a sculpture. It is a full adder, which means it can add one bit onto another. This might seem simple but this is the basic building block of every digital circuit and if you make 64 of these and connect them together you have as much programming power as a 64 bit computer. While doing this I ran into a ton of problems and after weeks of debugging and figuring things out I could finally calculate that 1 plus 1 equals 2.

This work was commissioned by NXP Semiconductors

One of my favourite works is from Karl Sims – Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994). This shows how an evolution algorithm works. Basically you run a piece of code for thousands of iterations with small mutations and those iterations create similar children based on how well they do. Do this for hundreds of generations and very complex behaviour starts to appear. This is kind of how nature does it. Only inside a computer we can speed up the whole process. Most of the time the failed iterations are hidden away. It’s the part that is deemed not interesting and only the best of each generation is shown. This feels quite sad for some reason and with my installation I wanted to show the actual complete process. So on the left side you see the best generation living its life inside a mini ecosystem trying to survive. and on the right side you see the thousands of failed iterations trying to get better so they too can be sent to the real world.