Synthetic Identity: Building Expressible Individuality Across Mediums (Topics in ITP) +
I hope to teach a class about synthetic identity and how the architecture, operation, and misuse of technical, social, and political systems has shaped the narratives that we use to tell the stories of who we are and what we’re meant to do. Different technologies present different perceivable surface areas of our identity and distort our presentations in way both harmful and liberating. Can we trace the ways the uniqueness of the individual leaks past the boundaries of different mediums, say handwriting, print, email, SMS, voice, video chat, and virtual reality? Can we explore generative AI not as a stepping stone to general intelligence, but as a already extant synthetic identity – full of perspective, narrative, voice, tone, history, context, presentation, etc. Can we construct a general model for the properties of synthetic identity? Can we use this to create identities that are stored within different physical and digital mediums and that are able to generate and express themselves? Can we encode and represent parts of ourselves, our environments, and the changes we wish to see in the world and place them in direct relationship with others?