Techno-Pop: Virtual Doubles and Dystopian Futures Around 1984

As part of wider research aiming at reestablishing the role of postmodernist media art practices to better understanding the current state of the relationships between art and technologies, it feels urgent to reconsider the discourses on virtuality brought forward in the 1980s on the issue of the double, or else on some proto avatars developed around 1984. The essay is articulated around three case studies, those of American artist Rebecca Allen’s animated mannequins, Italian collective Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici’s bitmap alter egos, and British transmedia character Max Headroom developed by George Stone, Annabel Jankel, and Rocky Morton. At the crossroads of arts and computer graphics, these early virtual doubles allegorized the increasing media saturation of the postmodern times and in so doing anticipated more recent phenomena such as those of the avatar, the metaverse and the digital twin. Rather than adopting a monographic approach, the paper will explore common features between the three, contextualizing them within the history of the double in art—from the historical avant-gardes to the information age—, the condition of displacement typical of video and media art practices, their contribution to the history of animation, their proximities with the dynamics of worldbuilding peculiar of videogames, the cultural frame of postmodernism and cyberpunk, the connections with Electronic Dance Music, and their appeal as pop cultural artifacts.