This artist is turning his BFFs into dreaming digital avatars
Social media already lets us keep ridiculously close track of our friends 24 hours a day. What if we could monitor their dreams, too?
Gabe Barcia-Colombo is something of a mad scientist of augmented reality. In the last decade, the artist has embedded holograms of his friends in household items like blenders and jars; sold their DNA in a vending machine; extrapolated strangers’ social-media feeds into virtual funerals and memorials; and recently used augmented reality to “hack” a Jackson Pollock at MoMA.
For his latest project, Barcia-Colombo has once again captured virtual doppelgängers of his friends. This time, he’s putting them to sleep, then letting visitors watch their recreated and projected dreams. This is DESCENT (Or Do Avatars Dream of Auto-Rigged Sheep).
The new installation—which opened at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco in June—features a room full of small beds, each 9 inches long. At first glance, the beds appear empty. But if you look at the room through Descent, the custom app Barcia-Colombo developed for the project, you’ll discover augmented-reality sculptures sleeping in each bed — avatars of Barcia-Colombo’s friends, mid-dream.
“They’re living sculptures. They’re there even when you’re not looking,” he says. “Each is a 24-hour-long character, living on an invisible plane.”
Here’s how it works: Barcia-Colombo takes 3D scans of people he knows — colleagues, friends, family members. Then, after interviewing them about their dreams, he enters the topics they’re most likely to dream about into a custom computer program.
Each of the avatars corresponds to a different visual pattern that the Descent app can recognize—those patterns appear as colorful, ’90s-inspired designs on the bedding. When an iPad or phone running Descent scans each unique pattern, the app projects the corresponding 3D avatar onto the bed. The program then pulls in their dream topics from a database at random, and visitors can watch the dreams floating above each sleeper’s head.
“It’s sort of like how your actual dreams work,” Barcia-Colombo says. “The avatars don’t have any control over them: the computer dreams for them.”
DESCENT is weird, but it also makes sense in a culture where we constantly keep tabs on the digital versions of our friends on social media. In fact, the show’s name DESCENT comes from the Sanskrit word for avatar, avatāra, which translates as “to descend into.”
“I’m thinking about how we descend into our social media characters and personas and become these avatars of ourselves,” he says. “This project is a representation of ourselves as these digital characters or creatures.”
The project also raises ethical questions about digital privacy and rights. Before taking 3D images of his friends, Barcia-Colombo had them sign a waiver, much like a photo release form. But consider a future where someone can “own” your 3D scan.
“Selling your 3D rights is a bizarre thing to think about,” he says. “In the future, what if someone like Amazon owned a 3D scan of you, as I now do of my models? What could they start trying to sell you with that information?”
DESCENT is now on the road, heading to Los Angeles in the autumn. While the exhibition remains contained in a gallery for now, Barcia-Colombo’s own digital avatar has already made its way into the real world. Just days before the show opened last spring, Barcia-Colombo realized he needed new business cards. So he printed the trigger for his own 3D avatar on paper.
The result? A virtual Barcia-Colombo now sleeps eternally on tiny bits of paper, dreaming of art projects past. It’s the perfect calling card.
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