AI (Ancestral Immediacies): Digital Twins and Data Doppelgängers

AI (Ancestral Immediacies): Digital Twins and Data Doppelgängers looks at the rapid growth of virtual representations and synthetic replicas that digital infrastructures enable, considering the implications of this ‘doubling’ of life. A ‘digital twin’ is a digital mirror of a physical object, system, or process that is kept up-to-date with real-world data, which can in turn be used to simulate, monitor, or analyse its offline counterpart. In contrast to static archives, these simulations offer real-time access and malleability—a promise that could all too easily slip into forms of control. If AI holds the promise to bring the ancestral into immediacy—via the automation of data organizing the past in order to predict the future—the digital twin posits itself as something akin to an immediate ancestor. Evoking the spiritual proximity of twins who seemingly know each other in a way that transcends language, even across spacetime, this figure proposes a privileged, ‘live’ access to the real world.

It has been argued that the digital twin functions in terms of objectification, understood here as the transformation of complex realities into forms that can be rendered and acted upon. For example, a digital twin of Hamburg’s famous Köhlbrand Bridge (Köhlbrandbrücke), which is due to be demolished and replaced by 2030, is now studied for weaknesses and decay, relying upon data point and warning sensors to detect deterioration as opposed to the material conditions of the physical architecture. The digital twin thus unsettles temporalities of maintenance and repair. Smart cities, where digital twins are deployed for the sake of climate regulation and other impeding crises, don’t just see longer term investment in sustainable architectures potentially sidelined in favour of immediate mitigation; they also develop cityscapes as transparent and actionable, thereby reproducing a particular subjectivity, for racialized and gendered bodies might not be able to move through these spaces with such ease.[1]

Despite its language of immediacy, the digital twin is better described as a three-dimensional archive running on gaming engines. It carries the hope of salvaging and maintaining what may soon be gone, while potentially ushering in a new stage of control at a distance. It is striking that digital twins are being deployed not just for the control of bridges and cityscapes, but also in the service of maintaining entire cultures in a world threatened by climate collapse. This is demonstrated by the case of Tuvalu, which has gained global acclaim as the world’s first digitized nation. As the nation’s physical territory is being threatened by rising sea levels, all that might eventually remain of its social and cultural heritage are digital remnants within its digital twin, lending it great archival importance. Typically held by its elders, the knowledge currently being transferred to the digital twin might be the nation's only option for sustaining tradition—and may even reformulate the very idea of national belonging according to a new form of cultural heritage that is inherently diasporic. Other nations, including those less threatened by environmental collapse, are following at Tuvalu’s heels.

Such developments provoke the question of what is datafied and datafiable—or how these data doubles represent and recontextualize their offline twins. Rather than being underpinned by democratic processes, such developments are rather driven by urgency and the enticement of experimenting with new digital architectures, while actual repair—such as investment in climate mitigation or infrastructural maintenance—runs the risk of being overlooked. This articulation through a language of excitement and limitlessness has the additional effect of flattening—or excluding altogether—labouring bodies and affect, deeming them uncomputable and therefore unimportant.

AI (Ancestral Immediacies): Digital Twins and Data Doppelgängers tackles the psychological, infrastructural, ethical, and affective dimensions of doubling landscapes, monuments, and personas by digital means. How are a doppelganger’s politics decided, its fragilities and vulnerabilities cared for? What are the psychological, infrastructural, ethical dimensions of doubling? What does it mean that humans are doubling reality in a moment marked by growing social anxieties that seem to emerge—and proliferate—from engagement with digital infrastructures? As AI fails to replicate the sensorial multiverse of human and non-human experience, through performances, walks, lectures, conversations, and an installation, AI (Ancestral Immediacies): Digital Twins and Data Doppelgängers considers the embodied affects and reactions to external stimuli as part of the Spiel of doubling.

[1] Gillian Rose, ‘Visualising human life in volumetric cities: City digital twins and other disasters’, Dialogues in Urban Research, 3/2 (2025), 148–169.