Is your avatar you?

What links Helen’s simulacrum to Alice’s mirror? Dorian Gray’s portrait to the Stargate? Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Il fu Mattia Pascal? Plautus’s comedies to your digital avatar? A journey into the concept of the double, where nothing is as it seems

«The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated¹» your avatar will say at your funeral. Or maybe not. In any case, you won’t be there to determine that. Should you be concerned? Every action we take online is tracked, recorded, and for over thirty years, it has contributed to shaping our digital twin. If you were to gather all the information from your various profiles on digital platforms, you would have a close approximation of your habits, social networks, preferences, and increasingly, your biometric data—the information that identifies your body among thousands of others on the planet. For more than twenty years² there has been talk of the digital twin, a digital copy that is part you, part your shadow. Or maybe not.

Since 2019 (2020 in Italy), on Meta platforms, you can add your face to your “cartoonish” alter ego, personalizing your avatar. As of last April (2024), on Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headsets, you can instead share your “realistic” hologram, which moves with you in a digital space shared with other users connected at the same time. As graphic engines and network infrastructures improve, it will become more possible to “give body” to your 3D twin. But even without “putting your face” in three dimensions, the silhouettes we’ve created on different platforms represent the latest version of the tension between what we want to show and what remains. A story with deep roots, which, once again, tells us something about our humanity.

From Helen’s simulacrum to Dorian Gray’s portrait

It wasn’t the real wife of Menelaus who went to Troy, but a «simulacrum endowed with breath»: this is the thesis sung in the Palinode by the poet Stesichorus, a century earlier in Magna Graecia, and it was the basis of Euripides’ tragicomedy Helen, in which she herself recounts her version of the story right from the prologue. The god Hermes had created an «empty phantom» made from «a piece of heaven» and sent it aboard the ship to Troy with Paris, hiding the real Helen in Egypt. Thus, the Greeks and Trojans had fought a war for nothing, suffering «for a cloud», as Menelaus says on the stage of the Theatre of Dionysus in 412 BC, while the Peloponnesian War, pitting Sparta against Athens, had raged for years outside. Plato will be born only sixteen years later: the simulacrum of Euripides’ Helen predates both the allegory of the cave³—in which the philosopher systematized the superiority of the “real” world of ideas over the material world—and the myth of the androgynous⁴, in which erotic-love desire was explained as “compensation” by the gods for splitting the original human beings in half. These beings, “doubles”, had one head, two faces, eight limbs, and two sexual organs, comprising three genders (male, female, and androgyne). From Plato onwards, the double became synonymous with ambiguity, which rational discourse was called upon to illuminate and “dissect” in the light of Ideas, to avoid confusing the true reality of concepts with the false representation of images. Yet for centuries, the simulacrum has been used to indicate what remains beyond: the shadows that Odysseus meets in the underworld are simulacra, like the shade of his mother whom he cannot embrace⁵, a scene echoed many centuries later in the Aeneid between Aeneas and his father Anchises⁶. The images of ancestors (Imagines maiorum), worn in processions and during funerals by the “Gentle” Romans, non-Christian people of Greek language and culture living in Rome, were also simulacra. Each individual wore the mask of the ancestor they most resembled.

«As some peoples believe that a man’s soul lies in his shadow, so others (or the same) believe it lies in his reflection in water or the mirror», wrote anthropologist James Frazer in The Golden Bough (1915).

From this, Frazer himself noted, the myth of Narcissus⁷ who died after seeing his reflection in the water, might have originated. Hence the custom of covering mirrors or turning them to face the wall when someone dies in the house, out of the fear that the dead may take with them the souls of those reflected. From this comes the fear of being portrayed or photographed, to avoid having one’s soul “captured”.

It’s no coincidence that the Doppelgänger, literally “double passer”, the evil twin of German folklore, casts no shadow and is not reflected in mirrors or water—a trait that brings it close to the vampires of Eastern European folklore. Neither alive nor dead. 

In Latin culture, the servant Sosia may encounter his alter ego, impersonated by the god Mercury, in a comedy of mistaken identities with a happy ending⁸. However, in the 19th-century European Romantic literature, the same encounter is a harbinger of tragedy: from William Wilson (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe to The Double (1846) by Dostoevsky, from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1866) by Robert Louis Stevenson to The Horla (1886-87) by Guy de Maupassant, interacting with one’s alter ego—often a persecutor—can be a symptom or cause of madness.

At the same time, attempting to kill one’s double always involves killing oneself, one’s socially or personally unacceptable parts. This is the interpretation of Otto Rank, Freud’s disciple, in his essay The Double (1914): the alter ego, the Doppelgänger who suddenly intrudes into everyday life, appears as a return of the repressed for those who see and believe in it.

The theme of the relationship between truth and representation, of life as a work of art and art as a mirror showing what we don’t want to see, is at the heart of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). In this novel, the simulacrum, the image, the representation, the portrait, is «truer than truth»⁹», meaning truer than the body, which lives but never ages. Like a statue. Or an eternal avatar with the same unchanging face.

From Alice’s mirror to our avatars

If the soul was once reflected in the mirror, the mirror of Dorian Gray, unlike his portrait, reflects an image that is not “true,” but mirrors his desires. «Mirror, mirror on the wall», the Queen of Snow White by the Brothers Grimm (1812) invokes, seeking confirmation that she is the fairest in the land.

Alice returns to WonderlandThrough the Looking-Glass (1871), at the border between what is and what could be. Mattia Pascal looks at himself in the mirror before, during, and after becoming Adriano Meis, and each time the mirror seems to reveal disturbing details that always take him “elsewhere” from where he is¹⁰. The aesthete Aleksej gets trapped in a mirror while his double roams the city. When he manages to escape, he realizes he can no longer see his reflection and has thus become a «double of a double»¹¹.  Atreju in the “Magic Mirror Gate” doesn’t see his own reflection but that of his reader, Bastian, in The NeverEnding Story (1979) between reader and read, between the realm of Fantàsia and the real world.

The mirror as a Stargate (1994) continues to play its role in the Matrix saga: in the first chapter (1999), the chosen one, Neo, is “sucked”, “dematerialised” into the mirror that marks the exit from the simulated world and entry into the real one. In Matrix Resurrection (2021), mirrors are space-time portals.

The Wachowski sisters’ saga captured in film one of the greatest fears at the turn of the millennium: that the digital, then called virtual, would replace the real world at the expense of individual freedom and creativity, immobilizing people and forcing them to serve as «living batteries» for dominant machines. Twenty years later, in the final chapter, Neo is a video game developer: the logic of gaming¹², with its instant rewards, quick actions, progressive levels of learning tied to scores and competitiveness, has entered every aspect of daily life and underpins the business model of the major platforms governing the internet market. 

It is to video games that we owe the revival of the term avatar: derived from the word “avatara”, which appeared in India between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC in the sacred Hindu text Bhagavadgītā, it referred to the descent of the god Vishnu in different forms to restore cosmic order.  A total or partial incarnation of the divine into matter, which, as early as the first French novels of the 1900s, became a symbol of body-swapping, of souls transferring and swapping in wrong bodies or extraterrestrial environments. However, it was only in 1986, with the release of the first multiplayer video game, Habitat, that avatar became “the digital reincarnation of the player,” according to the expression used by producer George Lucas. A reincarnation made of bits, of course: the digital avatar is dematerialized, essentially the digital graphic representation of a human body. An avatar that increasingly resembles us, to which, through Artificial Intelligence algorithms, we can already give our image, our voice, and sometimes even our movements.

This century, too, will have to increasingly face its own Doppelgängers: will we be able to look ourselves in the mirror?

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The story this article is about was discovered using an artificial intelligence tool, Asimov, developed by ASC 27, especially for Mangrovia. The tool helped us find the story, but the rest of the content you read and see is the outcome of creative processes and human sensibilities and is in no way generated by artificial intelligence. Follow us to find out the details of how we use artificial intelligence in the newsroom! 

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1. For more, Oxford University Press. (2013, April 18). Misquotation: “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Oxford Academic Tumblr. https://oupacademic.tumblr.com/post/48310773463/misquotation-reports-of-my-death-have-been ↩︎
2. To learn more about the “digital twins”, Grieves, M. (2014) Digital twin: Manufacturing excellence through virtual factory replication. White paper ↩︎
3. To delve into the myth, Platone (IV sec. a.C.), La Repubblica, libro VII, vv. 514 b – 520 a ↩︎
4. To delve into the myth, Platone (IV sec. a.C.), Simposio, vv. 189 c 2-193 d 5 ↩︎
5. As we can read in Omero (IX sec.a.C.), Odissea, libro XI, vv. 150-224 ↩︎
6. To read the passage, Virgilio (29/19 a.C.), Eneide, libro VI, vv. 841-887 ↩︎
7. To delve into the myth, Ovidio (2/8 d.c.), Metamorfosi, libro terzo, vv 339 – 509 ↩︎
8. To read more about this, Plauto (III sec a.C.), Anfitrione ↩︎
9. From Baudrillard, J. (1981), Simulacres et simulations, Paris: Galilée ↩︎
10. To deep dive into the story of Mattia Pascal, Pirandello, L. (1904), Il fu Mattia Pascal, Roma: Nuova Antologia ↩︎
11. From Čajanov, A. (2013), Lo specchio veneziano [1922], Roma: Elliot ↩︎
12. To further explore the logic of gaming, Baricco, A. (2018). The game. Torino: Einaudi ↩︎