On January 22nd 2020, Deepak Chopra, the new-age guru, was a guest on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Next to Chopra, on the host’s desk, was Chopra’s digital clone, a virtual version of him, appearing on the screen of a tablet device. After a round of questions from the host, virtual Deepak started to guide the audience through a short meditation. This example is only a fraction of a rapidly evolving phenomenon of creating human digital twins. At the core of this trend, is the desire to digitally sample and replicate a person’s physical traits as well as behavioral and emotional ones and to create a virtual identical twin.

There is an inherent difficulty in the process of transforming someone into digital form. The technologies in use today are incapable of creating authentic and realistic digital twins.
The assumption that human behavioural nuances and complex identity features (some of which are still elusive to us) can be sampled through analytical measures is misleading, and virtual entities created today might look like a specific person, but don’t ‘feel’ like that person. This dissonance creates a sense of eeriness in the observer, dropping the digital twin into the uncanny valley (Prof. Masahiro Mori, 1970). The twin is not perceived as an authentic and genuine manifestation of the actual person.

Abstract You questions the assumption that a hyper-realistic portrayal is necessarily the most authentic digital representation of a person. The project suggests that a basic and abstract visual manifestation might offer more potential for authenticity. Can we sample and distill a person's attributes into an abstract line, instead of a realistic digital figure? Would this person’s traits still be identifiable in this line?

In the project, an abstract linear form is created through an interactive interface which samples three unique human attributes: body movements, facial expressions and voice. These attributes are recorded and analysed in real-time using machine learning, and are then converted into an animated linear shape, a unique line for each person.

Abstract You offers an intuitive approach to transform a person from a physical entity into a digital one: an approach that asks not what do we see when encountering a person’s virtual image, but rather what do we ‘feel’.