The Death of the Avatar

You lift your head from your smartphone. You feel that something is missing. Your skin is where it should be, your memory seems intact — and yet, something is off. What happened to that photo from your 2013 holiday, taken by your best friend at the time? You can’t find the post you shared when you first travelled abroad. What became of the blog where, fifteen years ago, you documented letters sent to yourself from the future? Mateusz Janik’s project explores the experience of loss that has no clear endpoint — a form of ‘death’ that unfolds during one’s lifetime and often goes unnoticed. Over the past two decades, the internet has undergone a radical transformation: from a space of free expression and everyday archiving to an infrastructure governed by platforms, where access to one’s own data is no longer guaranteed. Although it is often assumed that nothing ever disappears on the internet, we are increasingly losing control over what we leave behind. Forgotten passwords, blocked accounts, and shifting platform policies place our content in a state of suspension — it continues to exist, yet remains beyond our reach. In this context, digital identity becomes fragmented, its fate entangled in the circulation of data, where automated systems of processing and content generation play an ever greater role. At the heart of the exhibition is a virtual reality video game. We take on the role of a digital entity that, after being blocked on social media, ends up in a digital purgatory. Within a limited timeframe, it must confront the content it shared during its lifetime before disappearing completely. The boundary between fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurred as it collides with a flood of AI-generated content. The work draws on the artist’s research into archival interfaces of social media profiles from 2004 onwards, examining changing modes of self-presentation — from MySpace to TikTok. Combined with the voices of Generation Z — the first generation to grow up fully within online environments — and with research in digital death studies, Janik reflects on the loss of data that, in a sense, was never fully ours to begin with. The remaining works presented in the Rodríguez space reflect on the condition of digital identity in its material dimension, combining research processes with artistic practice and extending these questions into physical form. A piece of synthetic linen has been printed with a degraded screenshot of an early MySpace profile. Inspired by the mystery of the Shroud of Turin, it serves as a farewell to a version of the self that can no longer be recovered. A repainted urn, containing content available online and filled with 300 grams of glitter instead of ashes, speculates on the commemoration of digital identity in the context of late capitalism, drawing on Jill Walker Rettberg’s concept of quantified self-representation. Meanwhile, a series of collages on metal sheets, composed of memes generated using a “not-so-intelligent” AI model and inspired by a post by Ethel Cain that is now (ironically) inaccessible, reflects on the current condition of the internet — one in which sincerity no longer exists and every utterance must already function as a meme. The exhibition raises questions about a future we are already nostalgic for. The research project “The Death of the Avatar: The Condition of Digital Identity After Losing Access to a Social Media Profile,” no. 2024/53/N/HS2/02764, is carried out as part of a grant awarded in the PRELUDIUM 23 competition organised by the National Science Centre (Poland).