Seminar (CareNet): The Secret Lives of Digital Twins - An Interdisciplinary Speculation

Program

Abstract

Digital twins are presently advertised as intelligent and dynamic replicas deployable to monitor and optimize entities and processes in a broad range of application contexts such as disaster management, health care, or urban development. Promoters of the emerging technology build on our fascination with twins and clichés about twinship as the “ideal form of attachment” (de Bres 2024) to present the digital twin as loyal companion that is intuitively supporting the wellbeing of its “real-world” equivalent. In techno-critical assessments, in contrast, the digital twin often gets portrayed as evil twin; a doppelgänger that is not what it appears to be and might have fraudulent intentions. Looking at the history of human twinship, we can see that not all twins necessarily measure up to the widespread stereotypes about twinship. Not only there have always been multiple forms of twinning and “un-twinning”, but also new twin kinds keep coming into existence (Viney 2021).

This multiplicity of human twin relations was the inspiration for an “interdisciplinary speculation”: Instead of dismissing the twin-metaphor as inept and misleading, its potential for the complication and re-imagination of the relation of digital representation and the entities and processes represented was explored based on the many twin relations described in twin fiction and twin studies. The results of this experimental endeavor –as will be shared in the presentation– are (interactive) short stories providing insights into ‘the secret lives of digital twins’, i.e. discussing the many facets of digital twinning that tend to get silenced in the adversarial discourse, such as matters of ownership, (in)justice, privacy, transparency, or (ir)reversibility. Building on the crucial role of storytelling and fiction in the making and un-making of technologies (e.g. Latour 1990, Arns 2009, Haraway 2014), the narrations seek to encourage a critical yet techno-optimistic adoption of the emerging technology.

Judith Igelsböck

Social researcher of emerging technologies and innovation. She has worked in various research areas, including human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, or innovation and organization studies. Judith approaches her research endeavors in a post-disciplinary and experimental mood and enjoys working with artists. She is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Social Sciences and Technology of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Currently, she is a visiting researcher at the CareNet Group of the Open University of Catalonia.