Essay - The Doppelgänger Series
The Doppelgänger Series is a collaboration between artist Susanne Fagerlund and artificial intelligence (AI). The machine learning algorithm is trained on images Fagerlund herself has photographed in Swedish nature reserves. Subsequently, the AI tries to mimic the originals thus creating artificial landscape images.
The strategy for clear-cutting old-growth forests is more widely applied in Sweden than in the rest of Europe. By so doing, the Swedish forest industry is causing a dramatic reduction of biodiversity, and increased carbon dioxide emissions in the midst of a burning climate crisis. The old-growth forest is replaced by monoculture plantations for the sole purpose of generating capital for the landowner. The saplings are planted to imitate a forest, but the manmade copy lacks the benefits and resilience that only time, and a varied ecosystem can bring.
Early on, digital tools were considered environmentally friendly. Nowadays, mounting emissions from server halls and pollution from extractive industries like rare mineral mining are complicating the narrative. While not printing every document is generally a good thing, sending emails and posting pictures on social media comes at a cost for the environment as well. Using biomass from trees instead of fossil fuels is marketed as a big part of the solution to the climate crises. However, this is a highly contested strategy since not all forests are the same although many of us lack the ability to discern between plantation and the real thing.
Looking at the basis of The Doppelgänger Series, the artistic process starts off as an archival impulse. Fagerlund engages in the timeconsuming work of travelling to nature reserves around Sweden, visiting the rare old-growth forests that still exist. The fact that the images she captures are then fed to an AI, add a morbid stratum that suggest a new form of life nourished by the destruction of the old. By collecting that which is at risk of extinction and freezing it for ever in images, the archive buries the forest while implying a continuation somewhere, somehow, in a different form - a photographic cryonics.
When analysing artworks created using new technologies, the form sometimes obscures the content. However, photography has always been entangled in a multitude of technologies typically referring both to the object in front of the camera lens as well as to its very own system of production.[1] Scholars have shown how new forms or media make themselves relevant by using strategies and iconography from older media in acts of “remediation”, meaning the incorporation of one medium within another medium.[2] However, it should be noted that a hybrid or collage format is often found in, but not unique to, new media art. A condition that applies to The Doppelgänger Series as well.
The collage, or photomontage, dates back to the early 20th century Dadaists and later the Surrealists who in the technique found a way to express political dissent and ideas about the unconscious. The archival logic that typically prescribes labels, categorization and searchability, is absolved when Fagerlund indiscriminately serves the algorithm her images. Like the “aura” of cultural context which is lost when infinite reproducibility is gained, we must ask ourselves what the digitally birthed nature does to the experience of the original.[3] What the AI reproduces are not exact copies, but a mix of thousands of images in a seemingly infinite number of combinations. However, to consider its offspring an entirely new species would be a mistake. Rather, parallels could be drawn to a new surrealist mode of automation.
What The Doppelgänger Series shows us is a kaleidoscopic, scrambled, and uncanny landscape that unveil, not a new type of nature, but the visuals of the algorithm itself. A tool that makes itself known by the discrepancies between original and copy and manifests the familiar as unfamiliar. Just like the Surrealists who used images to awaken their contemporaries in the 1920s from the dream of the previous century, The Doppelgänger Series examines today’s eco-nihilism and ultimately asks the question – what parts of the present will remain in the past and what potential do we bring into the future?[4]
[1]. Martin Lister, ed., The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (Routledge: London, 2013), 3.
[2]. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1999), 44-50.
[3]. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, 1935. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
[4]. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 157-168.
The Doppelgänger Series is a collaboration between artist Susanne Fagerlund and artificial intelligence (AI). The machine learning algorithm is trained on images Fagerlund herself has photographed in Swedish nature reserves. Subsequently, the AI tries to mimic the originals thus creating artificial landscape images.
The strategy for clear-cutting old-growth forests is more widely applied in Sweden than in the rest of Europe. By so doing, the Swedish forest industry is causing a dramatic reduction of biodiversity, and increased carbon dioxide emissions in the midst of a burning climate crisis. The old-growth forest is replaced by monoculture plantations for the sole purpose of generating capital for the landowner. The saplings are planted to imitate a forest, but the manmade copy lacks the benefits and resilience that only time, and a varied ecosystem can bring.
Early on, digital tools were considered environmentally friendly. Nowadays, mounting emissions from server halls and pollution from extractive industries like rare mineral mining are complicating the narrative. While not printing every document is generally a good thing, sending emails and posting pictures on social media comes at a cost for the environment as well. Using biomass from trees instead of fossil fuels is marketed as a big part of the solution to the climate crises. However, this is a highly contested strategy since not all forests are the same although many of us lack the ability to discern between plantation and the real thing.
Looking at the basis of The Doppelgänger Series, the artistic process starts off as an archival impulse. Fagerlund engages in the timeconsuming work of travelling to nature reserves around Sweden, visiting the rare old-growth forests that still exist. The fact that the images she captures are then fed to an AI, add a morbid stratum that suggest a new form of life nourished by the destruction of the old. By collecting that which is at risk of extinction and freezing it for ever in images, the archive buries the forest while implying a continuation somewhere, somehow, in a different form - a photographic cryonics.
When analysing artworks created using new technologies, the form sometimes obscures the content. However, photography has always been entangled in a multitude of technologies typically referring both to the object in front of the camera lens as well as to its very own system of production.[1] Scholars have shown how new forms or media make themselves relevant by using strategies and iconography from older media in acts of “remediation”, meaning the incorporation of one medium within another medium.[2] However, it should be noted that a hybrid or collage format is often found in, but not unique to, new media art. A condition that applies to The Doppelgänger Series as well.
The collage, or photomontage, dates back to the early 20th century Dadaists and later the Surrealists who in the technique found a way to express political dissent and ideas about the unconscious. The archival logic that typically prescribes labels, categorization and searchability, is absolved when Fagerlund indiscriminately serves the algorithm her images. Like the “aura” of cultural context which is lost when infinite reproducibility is gained, we must ask ourselves what the digitally birthed nature does to the experience of the original.[3] What the AI reproduces are not exact copies, but a mix of thousands of images in a seemingly infinite number of combinations. However, to consider its offspring an entirely new species would be a mistake. Rather, parallels could be drawn to a new surrealist mode of automation.
What The Doppelgänger Series shows us is a kaleidoscopic, scrambled, and uncanny landscape that unveil, not a new type of nature, but the visuals of the algorithm itself. A tool that makes itself known by the discrepancies between original and copy and manifests the familiar as unfamiliar. Just like the Surrealists who used images to awaken their contemporaries in the 1920s from the dream of the previous century, The Doppelgänger Series examines today’s eco-nihilism and ultimately asks the question – what parts of the present will remain in the past and what potential do we bring into the future?[4]
[1]. Martin Lister, ed., The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (Routledge: London, 2013), 3.
[2]. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1999), 44-50.
[3]. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, 1935. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
[4]. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 157-168.
Susanne Fagerlund
The Doppelgänger Series - Mourning mirrors for what is being lost
2022
Images: Susanne Fagerlund in collaboration with AI
Essay: Karolina Aastrup
Foreword: Susanne Fagerlund
ISBN: 9789198573923
Handmade artist’s book.
Limited edition of 5 (signed and numbered).
The Doppelgänger Series - Mourning mirrors for what is being lost
2022
Images: Susanne Fagerlund in collaboration with AI
Essay: Karolina Aastrup
Foreword: Susanne Fagerlund
ISBN: 9789198573923
Handmade artist’s book.
Limited edition of 5 (signed and numbered).
