How do digital multi-platforms branch our sense of alter-ego?
ACT 1 | SCENE 1
The Trans-Siberian train passes through the pastoral snowy landscape. Each second, the window is framing a different scene. The train represents the transition between fragmented digital identities and beneath the masks.
A family of three is sitting in the compartment.
MOM: You seem a bit distant lately. I feel like you are not sharing anything with us. It’s like you’re wearing… a mask.
BABUSHKA: She is hiding herself, a typical teenager, this generation!
MOI: A mask isn’t just something to hide behind, Grandma. Sometimes, it’s what keeps us together with our alter-ego.
MOM : But where does it end? Are you just going to keep…inventing yourself? How do you know what’s real?
MOI: Maybe I don’t need to. We are disembodied, fragmented, and alienated in a world where our bodies are not fully our own. (1)
Moi scrolls down through her phone.
PSYCHOLOGIST: …the body exists beyond organs, beyond surface. The face we wear is only a fragment. (2)
BABUSHKA: What’s the point of having all these “bodies” on the screen, when you’re right here? Бред (Bred). What are you listening to?!
MOI: –Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. They are (re)defining the future of visual culture (3)
MOM: – they are also, without question, deeply flawed.(3)
BABUSHKA: What’s the point of having a body if I theoretically could make or step into so many? (4)
MOI: Does anyone really know? “We invent ourselves through endless acts of transformation, never static but always in flux.(5)” And it’s not just me. We’re all fragmented. “We’re living in a permanent state of global dysphoria, where the body, society, and identity are all sites of conflict and discomfort. (6)
MOM: Enough! Shut up!
Moi keeps scrolling.
ACT 1 | SCENE 2
NARCISSUS looks at his reflection with intense focus. SIN flickers on a tablet screen beside him. PRIEST enters the compartment in the middle of the conversation between SIN and NARCISSUS.
SIN: And so, every day, you reassemble yourself. But does anyone really see you? Isn’t it all just…an illusion?
NARCISSUS (smiling at his reflection as SIN): Who cares? I don’t need anyone’s validation. I’m creating myself. “This body is no longer necessarily the body that loves itself, caught in the vertigo of self-contemplation.”(7)
SIN (mockingly): And if I showed you a version of yourself, an alter personality, you didn’t recognize? I stitch together before and after imagery of yourself as you put on your ‘face,’ with cutting commentary and humor.”(8) But tell me—who are you in the absence of an audience?
Priest looks at Narcissus.
PRIEST (murmurs): Don’t be absurd. There is no such a thing as alter ego. What a disrespect to the body that you are given. In the past, there was no such thing, the past will come back eventually.
Narcissus continues to scroll his phone for a while. He stops scrolling.
PSYCHOLOGIST : …But what is return, what is a revenant, what precisely “returns “? Is what “comes back” exactly the same as what once happened and then disappeared? Is there any connection between disappearance and coming back?(9)
Narcissus looks at the priest. Then turns his face towards the window, tries to fix his hair from his reflection.
NARCISSUS : What do you know about having an original image? Aren’t you always trying to be someone else for society?
PRIEST: Lord, help these poor beings to find their way.
SIN : We are not lost, we choose this. “The body, as a construction, an assemblage.”(10) Every layer is exactly as you want it.
Narcissus looks at the priest then the window.
NARCISSUS: Ever feel like you’re just a collage of everyone else’s expectations? I mean, look at me—this is curated perfection.
SIN: (Smirking) Perfection, huh? But what happens when the mask cracks? “A mask can liberate, yes, but it also conceals.”(11) Who are you without the followers, without the likes?
ACT 2 | SCENE 3
The train enters a deep, seemingly endless tunnel. Cellular service is lost, leaving everyone disconnected from their digital worlds. Screens start to glitch.
PSYCHOLOGIST (glitching): The concatenation of times leads to inevitable frictions and collisions(12)
MOI (Frightened): Mama? What’s this glitch?
MOM: I’m here, MOI, there is nothing to worry about. The glitch is a correction to the machine, and, in this way, a correction to the world.(13)
Babushka is sewing.
BABUSHKA: MOI, this glitch is just “a deviation that allows new ways of being to emerge.”(14)
MOI: “Everything does not move at the same rhythm; each being has its own beat, its own pace, and the encounter of these different times is the beating heart of community.”(15)
MOM: We are living in a permanent state of global dysphoria, where the body, society, and identity are all sites of conflict and discomfort.(16)
MOI: I feel lost.
Babushka continues sewing.
BABUSHKA: Do you feel lost in the eyes of others or in yourself?
ACT 2 | SCENE 4
NARCISSUS sits uncomfortably, staring at his phone in frustration as the internet signal decreases.
PSYCHOLOGIST: Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna -(17)
SIN (With a fainting voice): The fragmented whole, we have talked before, is the result of various juxtapositions and entanglements, starting with human territories, the wilderness, and the borders between th-e-e-m.(18)
Sin is gone.
NARCISSUS: Sin, SIN? There is no internet, no light.
He looks at the window and there is just the whole darkness.
PRIEST: (curious) Who is Sin, really? Is it just your mirror, a reflection of who you wish you could be?
NARCISSUS: (hesitates) Sin isn’t just a mirror—It is a part of me that’s real. You know, when people expose themselves, it’s not just a display—it’s powerful. It stirs something deep, something that pushes people to act, to take a stand.…(19) it is unfiltered.
PRIEST: Unfiltered, no. Can you hold on to them in this darkness? Or are they slipping away, one by one? [More contemplative] “The body, as an assemblage… surreal and dreamlike, pieces, organs, parts(20).” At what point do they make a whole?
NARCISSUS: [Defensive] What do you know about wholeness? “A male in his stereotype,” a man who can’t deal with his own femininity.(21) You’re fragmented too, priest.
PRIEST: We all are, perhaps. Freedom, walls… a glitch that liberates or imprisons. Your choice, Narcissus. But one day like now, the mask cracks.
Priest and Narcissus sit in the dark in silence for a while.
PRIEST: (Quietly) “Pleasure, Death, Reality(22)”… strange how they’re all that’s left when we peel away the layers, isn’t it? . A body without organs is always swinging between surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free.(23) If I stripped the boundaries all away, would I finally feel unbound, or just… empty? Maybe you are right about alter-egos.
NARCISSUS: This body is definitely not innocent… we are responsible for machines … This glitch is both an error and an opportunity for liberation.(24)
PRIEST: So, we all can have different personas of ourselves on multiplatform?
ACT 3 | SCENE 5
The train emerges from the tunnel.
Babushka seems impressed by Moi’s perspective about life during their conversation in the tunnel, now she is intrigued to know more about it.
@your_psycho_logist started a live video.
BABUSHKA: What is this notification MOI?
MOI: It’s the psychologist that I follow babushka. Let’s join her call together!
@.moi. joined the chat.
PSYCHOLOGIST: as bodies disappear within the everyday interactions of the Internet, that which we might have assumed as inherently private—our physical bodies—remain at risk of becoming increasingly public, the abstracted fragments of our online selves making moves independent of those chosen of our own volition. (25)
Babushka grabs MOI’s phone. She is the new @.moi. now.
@.moi. : If our public alter-ego changes, does that mean our true self is changing too?
PSYCHOLOGIST: This weave is rather a whole, but a fragmented whole,or , if you will, an interweaving of networks, flows and circuits that are constantly recomposed at variable speeds and on multiple scales…..(26)
@.moi. : So, when I’m in drag, or when I’m creating my digital self online, it’s not about covering up who I am. It’s about seeing what I could be.
MOM: I think it is your way of saying “Here I am, on my own terms.”
BABUSHKA : I understand Moi now. – Moi, can you open me an Instagram account?
ACT 3 | SCENE 6
Priest and Narcissus sit together as the daylight fills the compartment. Sin has reappeared on Narcissus’s phone screen with a bunch of notifications. Narcissus continues scrolling through Instagram.
PSYCHOLOGIST: This weave is rather a whole, but a fragmented whole,or , if you will, an interweaving of networks, flows and circuits that are constantly recomposed at variable speeds and on multiple scales…..(27)
@sin_of_narcissus: A way of seeing that … reveal[s] a blurring between ‘the real’ and ‘the digital,’ … the human and the machine.(28)
SIN: (speaking from the screen, smirking) I am a fragment of you Narcissus. I’m tired of staying on the sidelines.
NARCISSUS: No, you are not on the sidelines. We just live in separate worlds.
SIN: We’re not meant to live in separate worlds. I’m as real as you are—just a different face of the same person..
PRIEST: (nodding) Maybe it’s not about keeping anything hidden anymore.
Narcissus scrolling through his phone again.
PSYCHOLOGIST: …..There is no body that is not mobile. Mobility affects all kinds of goods, data, and information.(29)
Priest looks at Narcissus.
PRIEST: Wait what!!?? Блин (blin)
NARCISSUS: Is there a problem?
PRIEST: What if new modes of growth and information diffusion are possible, modes that we have not yet seen because they are not yet feasible with our current technology level and economic scale?(30) Is-is it possible for me to join my church meeting from here? Could you help me?
NARCISSUS smiles and opens his laptop. He connects to the church via Zoom.
NARCISSUS: Can you see the people?
PRIEST: Yes, yes! My dear people, I would like to share with you a new era for our meetings, multiplatforms. The community that becomes a single thing… necessarily loses the in of being-in-common… Community is not the work of fusion into a body, nor can it be the work of a production or completion that would make it finally and properly a common being.(31) This is a time of change.
– THE END –
BIBLOGRAPHY
- Agamben, G., Kishik, D. and Pedatella, S. (2011) Nudities. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
- Gil, J. (1998) Metamorphoses of the body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Grosz, E.A. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Guattari, D. (1980) ‘Body without organs’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press (English Translation).
- Hanson, R. (2020) The age of em: Work, Love, and life when Robots Rule the Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Hayles, N.K. (2010) How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and Informatics. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
- Magalhães, L. and Martins, C.O. (2023) Masks and human connections: Disruptive meanings and cultural challenges. Cham, Cham: Springer International Publishing Palgrave Macmillan.
- Mbembe, A. and Corcoran, S. (2022) The Earthly Community: Reflections on the last utopia. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing.
- Russell, L. (2020) Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London: Verso.
