Experiment 7 / ID://ASCII

< Introduction >

What happens when your identity is rebuilt from only three choices?

ID://ASCII examines how algorithmic identities are constructed from the smallest actions we make online. The experiment begins with a simple task: users choose three ASCII characters. These become the only data the system is allowed to “know” about them.

The live camera captures the user’s silhouette and reconstructs it as a mosaic made solely from those characters. Displayed beside the real-time reflection, the ASCII version reveals how algorithms compress rich human presence into narrow, predefined vocabularies, showing how our digital selves are continuously shaped, limited, and reassembled from the traces we leave behind.