Could Your Future Kin Be an Avatar?

In today’s episode, host Hannah Balber discusses digital doubles, identity and a new kind of technological theater with Finnish media artist Hanna Haaslahti. Her most recent work, Ancestors focuses on exploring the narrative possibilities of digital doubles. In an immersive room, AI-generated versions of the visitors begin to reproduce with one another. The work raises questions about identity, individualism, and kinship in the future.

This episode of Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1.

Host: Hannah Balber
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner 
Editing: Yazdan Zand 
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger 

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica 

Resources:
Hanna Haaslahti

Transcript

Hanna Haaslahti: That was the time when we could first see the artificial faces created by A.I., and there was a big sort of, I would say, a panic reaction about it. Like, what can we expect now from A.I. when it can create truly photorealistically realistic human beings who are no ones. 

[Music] 

Ana: Welcome to Art Is Not a Thing, the podcast series about art as a practice of critical inquiry, knowledge production and world-building. My name is Ana Carabelea part-time host and producer of the podcast. For the new season of Art Is Not a Thing, we’ve partnered with Radio O1–one of Austria’s leading cultural voice–to bring you the next six episodes. Over the next months, my colleague and radio journalist Hannah Balber will discuss with artists and researchers whose work questions and reimagines our practices in and of the world. In today’s episode, Hannah discusses digital doubles, identity and a new kind of technological theater with Finnish media artist Hanna Haaslahti. Her most recent work, Ancestors focuses on exploring the narrative possibilities of digital doubles. It’s an immersive room installation in which AI generated versions of the visitors begin to reproduce with one another. In conversation with Hannah,  she discusses how Ancestors uses digital technologies to challenge ideas of the double and the individual. Enjoy the conversation!   

[Music] 

Hannah Balber: Welcome to The Artist Not a Thing podcast. Hanna, it's great to have you. 

Hanna Haaslahti: Thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation. 

Hannah: In your current project, Ancestors, you explore digital doubles’ relationships and social structures. Could you describe what actually happens? So when someone enters the installation, what do they see? And what is the project about, for you? 

Hanna: It’s a sort of immersive experience where you are first creating your own double. So the installation begins in a portal which is connected to a virtual portal. And when you step into the physical portal, the virtual portal generates your double. And obviously it's not exactly like you, but it resembles you. There's a bit of uncanniness obviously there. And I think that was an important part of the artistic creation also that there is this distance between you and the double and the uncanniness that it's not exactly you. It's an artistic interpretation of you. Makes it easier for you to then follow what happens next in the installation.  

After that, you enter the second space where all the previously modelled avatars are already searching for a pair or someone or looking for who is there. And then our system randomly pairs the avatars, and you become a parent to a digitally generated descendant. So basically, the audience becomes parents of a digitally generated genealogy. 

And the idea for this installation came in 2018 and 2019 when I saw the paper released by NVIDIA researchers. That was the time when we could first see the artificial faces created by A.I., and there was a big sort of, I would say, a panic reaction about it. Like, what can we expect now from A.I. when it can create truly photorealistically realistic human beings who are no ones? And when I was going through the visuals of that study, I thought that this could be actually interesting, not the sort of, like, anonymousness of these people, but if it would be you who would be created with A.I., and then you would become the sort of facial resource for the next generation of avatars.  So, I thought that turning that anonymousness into somebody who can then participate in the project and create the doubles and follow the digital genealogy, I thought that could also [...] tell us something about family and human relations in general.  

Hannah: What fascinates you about combining digital technologies with actual human presence? 

Hanna: As an artist, I've always been super fascinated by doubles. And that's kind of like... I started making art in the 90s, and my first installations were digital shadows. So I really felt that this kind of double structure is something which I can really create my own artistic approach with. I was not so interested maybe in the topics of Evil Twin or in German, you have very powerful storylines with doppelgangers. And those are always very sinister characters. I mean, they are out there to somehow kill the original. And I was trying to find some other meaning for my double universe. And then I found these much older stories where doubles are actually sort of enhancements or enlargements of yourself. And they are actually your helpers. And from there, I think it kind of made me think about how the double somehow is a sort of manifestation of our inner duality. That's the sort of thing I want to emphasize here, that we can be anything. We might be this person, that person. And it's not nothing to be afraid of. 

Hannah: I think the idea of the digital double also resonates strongly with social media culture, where we already construct, perform and circulate versions of ourselves, essentially. So to what extent do you think digital doubles are already a part of what we are? 

Hanna: Definitely. I mean, I think that's why, in the first place, I think I could make this kind of installation because people were already familiar with their face or their identity being circulating and shared on the net. So, I thought that was kind of like the first step which made this kind of work possible in the first place. But on social media, you always - I'm not there, so I'm not the specialist – but I think on social media it's more about ownership and who owns this space and what I can do with my face and how I want to represent myself. Whereas in my installations it's more about, well, you'll just be an actor in a narrative which was invented by me.  

But I think it sort of renegotiates this power structure between the audience and the performers because those are mixed. The audience becomes the performers. So you are kind of not visiting some kind of play where all the other actors already know how this should go. You are all there visiting virtual reality, as doubles. And I think that makes it a sort of - how would I say - a more democratic space perhaps than this traditional structure where you are there together with the audience watching something that is made for you. And this is also something I really want to break: this traditional relationship, this invisible borderline between the spectacle and the audience. And because of my background in theater as a set designer, that was kind of like what I always tried to sort of somehow question. And when I found computer vision and digital technology, I could create installations which are really negotiating these positions.  

Hannah: And the play that you're setting these avatars into is a story of love, one could say, or of meeting someone. Does that also play a role for you? Like, how are digital spaces, apps, dating apps, platforms also changing the way or influencing the way that we form relationships?  

Hanna: Well, I personally feel that this multitude of digital relationships is actually making people lonelier in a way. So, you would kind of think that I have a huge following on Facebook and I have many friends in online, but I think we should make a sort of clear distinction between people we are physically in contact [with] in our lives and not to replace them with digital contacts 

because that leads, I think, to a completely different kind of relationship. And I found 

that people are very easily lured into this idea that they are having a social life, even [when the] reality is that they are sitting in front of the screen every day and just doing the conversations online. And I think it definitely changes - I'm not evaluating that it's only bad - but it leads to a certain kind of loneliness, which in your physical life [...] will definitely have strange consequences. 

[Music]  

Ana: Hanna Haaslahti is a Finnish media artist and filmmaker based in Helsinki. With a background in photography and set design, she creates interactive and immersive works that explore the relationship between human presence, technology, and narrative. Computer vision is a central tool in her practice, and she is interested in how machines shape social relations. Her artworks generate new narrative interactions between people, exploring the possibilities of human-machine collaboration. Her work has been exhibited at international media art festivals and in galleries, including Ars Electronica, Hamburg Kunsthalle and the BFI London Film Festival. Her most recent installation Ancestors premiered at Tampere Art Museum in Finland in September 2025. The project received an Honorary Mention at this year's Prix Ars Electronica in the category of New Animation Art. 

[Music] 

Hannah: So in Ancestors new family lines are formed, are actually generated through these interactions of the avatars, of their digital doubles and descendants. And today, detailed family trees are not as common. They maybe belonged to more privileged families, families who have those long heritages and lineages. But for many people, the knowledge about their ancestry stops at the great grandparent’s generation probably.  

Hanna: That’s true, yeah. Yeah. 

Hannah: How do you think digital archives are changing that or will change that in the future? Do you think in the future we will know - like my great, great, great, great, great, I don't know, grandchildren in 300 years will maybe know about me? How do you see that? How will the line of family heritage and lineage change with digital means? 

Hanna: I think there definitely will be... I'm kind of more curious about what's happened in the past [...] because that's something which is, you know, hidden from us. And we can only imagine, like these long lineages, where do we come from? All the beings and creatures [...] going all the way from the mysterious beginning, whatever that is. And I think there is this kind of problem nowadays that we try to think, or we are kind of inclined to think about our face only from the perspective of ownership and what can I do to my face. And I own it. I can shape it. I can do anything I want and it's mine. And what I think is that we should be able to also look at our face as something I'm sharing with this long, long, long lineage of people and beings before me and hopefully also following myself and then see that this is something we share. And it's a kind of like a gift I get. And I personally know many peopl s in the future, which might help in the preservation of digital heritage in the future. 

Hannah: What do you mean by kind of new identity politics? 

Hanna: Well, if you look at how the Internet has changed: in the beginning, you didn't need many passwords. You could log online. And now it seems that it's all about restrictions, what you can enter and what you can do. And I think that's obviously a sort of competition between network safety and the people who are kind of like trying to maybe do something criminal with networks. So, in a sense, this kind of finding some kind of free space where we could again come together without these constant restrictions and passwords and identity politics. In the 90s, the Internet was really about that for a few years, before the platforms kicked in and started to organize people in different groups. 

Hannah: You’ve been active as a media artist for several decades. What are some of the biggest shifts you've noticed, also regarding your work with digital doubles, identity? 

Hanna: I think the biggest shift is definitely this kind of constantly diminishing space of all our freedom. And on the Internet, it has been kind of happening since the platforms started to emerge and people felt that these services are better for protection and also for finding other people. But at the same time, I think that we lost some of that wilderness that was there in the beginning. And I think since those platforms, we are still in the process of, of... [being] dominated by them. And I think that's a kind of... I don't know if there's a possibility even to invent an online space which would kind of provide that kind of freedom anymore because it seems that every time when something new is happening, very, very soon it becomes commodified and owned by somebody. 

Hannah: Coming back to the artistic form of the project: you've talked a lot about theater, and you've described ancestors as a new kind of technological theater where digital doubles become the protagonists in a fictional story. And extending that idea, we already see personalized books, A.I. generated films and digital content where people become the main character of their own story. So how do you see that? What do you think are the consequences of this development? 

Hanna: I think the trajectory of technologies which make us lonelier and lonelier is maybe sort of finding its peak in our era with all of these customized helpers only for your needs. And I think in some ways, if you think about VR headsets, they are a sort of technology epitomizing this loneliness: you alone with yourself without the reach of others in physical space. And I think I have tried to use real space and installation space as a sort of alternative to still make this opportunity that people come together in a public space, and share this same space with their doubles. That's my way of trying to lure people back to the real spaces, back to the square, back to the kind of meeting points where you are together with all the other people experiencing a narrative. 

Hannah: Yeah. You said people are lonelier. Do you also feel people are more self-centered or selfish even maybe? 

Hanna: There’s not really one answer to that. Because if you think about, for instance, how github for instance, how people are sharing their code and working together, that's not selfish. And I think that’s really fantastic, how people, when they make their discoveries, immediately share the code with other people. And also, if you think about operating systems like Ubuntu, that's based on communal work, where people are together making something. So there are still examples of how people can make things work very well just together without being selfish. But obviously, maybe, there's also people who are using these technologies completely differently. And then we see this kind of opposition happening between these two approaches to digital technologies. 

Hannah: And I feel like many people nowadays are yearning for offline spaces and offline encounters or being back together. Or at least I feel that way. Is that the same way in Finland? How do you perceive it?   

Hanna: Yeah, definitely. I think especially in Finland we are totally like overpowered with technology. And that has to do with the fact that Finland chose the digitization as a sort of agenda 20 years ago. So all the public systems, all the schools, have been sort of very quickly force-fed into the digital systems. And now we see this kind of a hangover situation that now when you say somewhere in Finland, hey, let's make a digital innovation, everybody's like, no, don't, don't say anything about it. I don't want to hear about it. Because [...] everybody's very fed up with this kind of like non-alternatives to digital learning devices or social media. So, I really feel that we are definitely going to see this movement out of digital spaces. 

Hannah: So what interests you? How do you see your role also as an artist working with media, with digital technologies? 

Hanna: Well, I think you have to be super responsible. What kind of tools for instance, you are using in your artworks. Also, that people can be safe at your artwork, that their personal data is not distributed without their consent or without telling them. But at the same time, while you're making sure that you don't make any sort of security mistakes, you still have to make a compelling artwork. And I think it's sort of walking in this very narrow space where you don't want to make sort of any stupid mistakes about identity politics but still provide opportunities or visions for future or alternative ways [in which] computer vision, for instance, is used. That's super important because if you see how computer vision is used by those in power, that's obviously something I don't want to do as an artist. I want to use it to connect us, to make us tell stories to each other and not to enhance those in power. 

Hannah: What do you hope people take away from meeting their digital double in this installation? 

Hanna: In my works, I try to be as visual as possible, to sort of force my own narrative on the people. I believe that when they see their own double, there's already a little narrative going on between you and your double. And then obviously meeting your descendant, meeting a possible parent in the installation, hopefully helps you to reflect your own boundaries between your closed ones or your community. I mean, we come from all different kinds of situations and I feel that I wanted to, in this installation, open up this sort of possibilities of all kinds of families to enjoy it, so that there is not just one narrative which is being told, but it opens up for you as a space to reflect your own social commitments and also maybe how you are controlled by your own community and your closed ones. And what are the sort of limits of your own family? Where do you draw the borderline? Should it be larger? Should it be smaller? Those kind of questions.  

Hannah: Wonderful. Thank you very much for the conversation!  

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Ana: That’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and hope you enjoyed it! Today’s episode was brought to you by Radio Ö1 and Ars Electronica. Join us next month for a new episode, and in the meantime, follow us or share the show with someone you think might like it.