Digital Shadows: Ars Electronica Festival 2025

Do you have control over your digital identity?

Digital Shadows invites you to experience questions of digital and physical identity, data security, and control up close. In immersive zones woven with choreographic elements, you encounter reflections, copies, and measurements of yourself – while simultaneously getting lost in a system that knows more about you than you’re willing to reveal.

Between play and analysis, concealment and exposure, a powerful reflection emerges on identity in the age of facial recognition, deepfakes, and algorithmic profiling. How do you trick a camera? How visible do you want to be? Who owns your digital traces, and who benefits from them?

This experiment, a collaboration between science and art, makes power structures, visibility, and self-determination in digital space tangible. Through engagement with digital materiality and algorithmic intelligence, it reveals a sometimes absurd, always immediate mirror of our role in data-driven worlds – until we face our own digital dilemma, with the decision still in our hands.

Resources