Uncanny Me

Director’s Statement: Katharina Pethke and Christoph Rohrscheidt

When I met Lale for the first time, she told me that she wanted to stop modelling after eight years and that she was thinking of getting herself an avatar that could work for her. Listening to her ideas, I vacillated between disbelief and fascination: on the one hand I thought the whole thing was morally highly questionable and on the other hand I immediately wanted to know how it could work, what it would look like and whether it would work at all: A digital clone that moves and acts like its human model.

The ensuing discussions were all hypothetical at first. Our concerns, but also possible advantages, could only be examined if the idea was also put into practice. So Christoph and I decided to make a film about it – and luckily Lale was also keen on the experiment. In order to get to know her at all and to get an insight into her reality, we gave her a camera – with the assignment to create a video diary. The result surprised us: it was honest and reflective, open and exciting, and quite the opposite of the polished world in which Lale moves professionally.

On the production side, it was a bit more complicated: what had previously been a play of ideas suddenly had to be realised in reality. What interested me most was the fundamental question of what is “real” (even without an avatar) about Lale: Did all of those images in magazines and ads represent the person Lale at all?

The next question was: If it really should soon be the case that everyone creates their own avatar of themselves (which is Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for his “Metaverse”) – what do the “source”, i.e. the actual person, and the depicted avatar person, who will soon be acting independently, have in common – and doesn’t a distinction necessarily have to be made?

At this point, there are more open questions than answers: the philosophical body-mind question is juxtaposed with the very concrete ethical and legal problems that still need to be solved.