Doubles and Doppelgängers

In Seven Movements:

• Whisper
• Stutter
• Shimmer
• Utter
• Growl
• Shout
• Hush

The piece consists of two sets of doubles: a pair of saxophonists and a pair of electronic synthesists. Field recordings intertwine with extended saxophone techniques and vocal samples from the mirror world, all processed and reproduced live in quadraphonic sound.

Featuring:

Phillip Greenlief, Tenor Saxophone

Danny Fisher-Lochhead, Alto Saxophone

Peter Cuffari, Electronic Synthesis, Drum Machine, Digital Doubles

Jonathan Henderson, Samples and Field Recordings, Electronics Synthesis, and Digital Doubles

In the 2023 book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein seeks to make sense of the perils of our political, technological, and psychological present by exploring the figure of the doppelgänger. She begins by following her own doppelgänger, Naomi Wolf, on a journey from celebrity feminist author to right-wing conspiracy theorist. (As Naomi Wolf’s public persona became increasingly associated with neo-right-wing figures like Steve Bannon, people publicly mistook Naomi Klein for Naomi Wolf). Klein found this doppelgänger mix-up troubling as Wolf’s reactionary politics were often attributed to her. Following Wolf into the conspiracy theory “mirror world,” Klein investigates the appeal of the online paranoia that flourished during the pandemic. She coins the word “diagonalism” to describe the collapse of traditional left and right political perspectives in this context as the right seized upon language and political concepts once the province of the left to support their efforts to remake American life: from appropriating the language of “bodily autonomy” to promote vaccine skepticism to usurping the language of economic populism while at once accelerating corporate corruption and influence, to naming efforts to end a “rigged economic and political system” to justify an increasingly oligarchic national order. Klein describes this rhetoric as echoing from the mirror world, a place where reality is subject to debate and AI troubles distinctions between the real and the synthetic. Doppelgängers haunt this internet landscape as our digital doubles, or online avatars, proliferate. The corporate commons of social media is remade as a hall of mirrors, a place where misinformation and self-reinforcing narratives pervade.