Swap, Use & Abuse your identity

Mouchette

Mouchette, the online virtual character has an unusual status of existence. www.mouchette.org
She is the author and the creation at the same time, and yet through her remote internet life she remains invisible, anonymous, genderless, untouchable, neither alive or dead.
The participants of her interactive website confide in her in the most intimate way, because she am an imaginary being, living in their own head.

Her personality embraces all of her participants’ minds and together they form a collective consciousness pondering over questions of life and death in the digital era. With the reactions of the participants to her website she has composed animation films displaying many of the texts she received, spoken out through speech bubbles by pixellated characters who tell their most private thoughts.

Staffan Björk and Ayumi Higuchi swap identities

"Swap Me" is an online service where you can swap your digital identities with someone else for a certain amount of time, such as e-mail account, myspace, website, blog, etc. It’s a kind of "e-bay" of the online identity. Those digital spaces are usually protected by a simple combination of username and password. What happens if you exchange them to somebody else? You would live another person's life behind the computer! This project reveals the advantage and the danger of convenience in digital identity.