Featuring interactive performance lectures, screenings and debate, this dynamic half-day symposium examined the integration of the digital in the construction of the ‘self’, asking how this has complicated our experience of material reality. With the merging of the ‘real’ with the virtual on and off-line, ‘play’ with the creation of multiple ‘selves’ is now commonplace. This offers limitless opportunities for impersonation, deception and fakery; useful tools for political counter-strategies, but also the roots for anxieties regarding loss of control over issues of ‘real’ identity. So what are the implications for the material realities of the body in the mangled and mutable unreal ‘real’ of the virtual, digital realm?

Featuring presentations from Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla, Noam Toran, Onkar Kular, Ben Dalton and Leslie Kulesh, participants used the term ‘authenticity’ as a prism through which to explore and challenge questions regarding impersonation, politics and gendered resistance, addressing the question of whether the faked, forged, inauthentic multitude-identities afforded by the digital era are a cause for panic, or a point of potential?