This work is part of the series Who is J.Doe?
I AM FEASIBLE
“The singularity of each being is not something added from outside to the reality of the with, but rather that which makes it possible as such. There is no with — no we, no ensemble, not even society — without the singularity of each one. Conversely, there is no singularity without a with, without a community of singularities”
Jean-Luc Nancy
"Who is J.Doe?" at Affair #3 in Galerías Larreta, August 2025
This interactive installation was presented at Affair #3, Galerías Larreta in August 2025.
"Who is J.Doe?" invites the viewer to play the role of an “Amateur God”, bringing to life a fictional and plural subject: J. Doe. It invites participation in a unique artistic experiment that questions the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the biological and the digital.
Based on a unique genetic profile created by the artist by combining 23 anonymous DNA profiles provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, an AI generated 99 distinct faces that this being could have — highlighting the near-identical genetic makeup we share as humanity. These faces are a fundamental part of every work in this series. Go to “99.9% or 0,1%.”
Through an interactive application, the audience can select facial fragments from these 99 versions and add parts of their own faces to collectively construct the identity of J. Doe, a fictional and plural character who is everyone and no one at once. In this way, identity becomes fluid, multiple, and shared.
By encouraging participants to engage in a role-playing exercise as creators, the work evokes the theories of “relational art” proposed by French critic Nicolas Bourriaud. For Bourriaud, contemporary art is defined by a shift toward participation, interactivity, and the creation of social situations. Instead of producing autonomous objects, relational artists seek to generate contexts where people can connect, communicate, and co-create.
This relational impulse materializes through a special application inspired by the world of video games — a deliberate choice. Video games have played a crucial role in accelerating the development of artificial intelligence, serving as testing grounds for machine learning algorithms and autonomous decision-making systems. By situating the creation of J. Doe within a video game context, the work draws attention to the growing entanglement of human identity and technological systems.
The outcome of this collaborative creative process is a being that embodies both anonymity and collectivity. J. Doe emerges as a mosaic of faces — a composite singularity that challenges traditional notions of individuality and authorship. This gesture recalls literary theorist Roland Barthes’ concept of the “death of the author” — the idea that the meaning of a work is not determined by the intentions of a single creator, but rather arises from the interaction between text, viewer, and cultural context.
At the same time, the work raises profound — and perhaps unsettling — questions about the implications of genetic manipulation and the engineering of the human body. By allowing participants to freely mix and match facial traits, "I Am Feasible" evokes ethical debates surrounding technologies such as CRISPR and gene editing. If it were possible to design human beings from scratch, selecting desirable features and eliminating the undesirable, would this lead to greater equality — or merely to a homogenization of identities? The work thus functions as a provocative thought experiment, a speculation on the possible futures of human identity in an age of accelerated technological transformation.
The notion of “plural singularity” proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy is central to understanding the work and its exploration of collective identity. In his book Being Singular Plural (1996), Nancy develops an ontology that challenges the traditional conception of being as autonomous and self-sufficient. Instead, he argues that existence is always co-existence — that we are fundamentally interwoven with others in a network of relations that precedes and constitutes our individuality.
In "I Am Feasible", this idea is made tangible through the participatory process of constructing J. Doe’s face. Each participant contributes a singular fragment of their own features, but these fragments do not remain isolated or autonomous. Instead, they combine and interlace into a new composite singularity — a face that is both familiar and strange, one’s own and another’s. Through this process, the work makes visible the fundamentally relational nature of identity — the way each I is always inhabited and shaped by a multitude of others.
Yet, the work also suggests some of the tensions and ambiguities inherent to the notion of plural singularity. By creating a composite face that resembles none of the individuals who contributed to it, it raises the question of whether co-existence necessarily entails a certain loss or dissolution of individuality. Do we become mere interchangeable fragments within a larger mosaic, or do we retain an irreducible singularity even in our exposure to others?
By inviting visitors to participate in the creation of a new face, a new being, the work challenges us to confront both the possibilities and the limits of our plural singularity in a technologically mediated world. It invites us to consider how we might embrace our fundamentally relational and participatory nature, while still striving for a sense of singular agency and individuality.
This interactive installation was presented at Feria Ch.ACO, Santiago de Chile in March 2026.
This work is a reinterpretation of the original ‘I AM FEASIBLE (WHO IS J.DOE?)’, this time presented through mobile devices. In this version, J.Doe is represented with small clay body parts instead of mannequin pieces. Each fragment is carefully handmade and designed to be unique, representing a different individual, emphasizing the concept of J.Doe as an anonymous and collective identity. Each piece bears a number on it and a corresponding code on the back of the work, giving the installation a scientific-laboratory aesthetic, highlighting the genesis of the work and the DNA samples obtained from GenBank.
"Who is J.Doe? - Portable Version" at Ch.ACO, Chile, March 2026
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