Emmanuel Van der Auwera

The video installation Wake Me Up at 4:20 explores internet trends related to YouTube celebrities and the disturbing phenomenon of suicide memes. These provide step-by-step instructions inciting players to ultimately kill themselves. Embarking from the event of two young girls who rose to instant fame following their online suicide through such a game, Van der Auwera created a video with avatars designed by 3D software commenting on the subject and philosophising about identity. Despite their visual resemblance with characters from video games, the avatars seem authentic, speaking with voices extracted from anonymous online video comments. Facial recognition software was used to animate the avatars’ facial expressions; however, since the technology also produces glitches (digital errors), the software causes the faces to freeze or distort strangely as they speak. This in turn makes them appear all the more vulnerable, lending the digital beings a semblance of humanity.