Our Digital Poets in Residence for April, Jenny Danes and Tayiba Sulaiman, centred their residency around an idea they have called ‘alternative selves’.
Tayiba writes:
Jenny and I centred our residency around an idea we’ve been calling ‘alternative selves’. It’s essentially the idea that every so often, you get a little glimpse of the ways other people perceive you differently to the way you perceive yourself. This goes for other people too; we were generally interested in that strange dissonance in the way two ‘versions’ of the same person compare.
To unpack the idea slightly, we came up with a list of places for spotting these different versions; Jenny then drew it out as a puzzle. The pieces are numbered.
If you’d like a prompt at random, pick a number between 1 and 18, and see what those alternatives might look, sound and feel like. There are two spaces for any extra ones which come to mind.
Jigsaw key code (if you pick a number, this is what it corresponds to)
- Your previous nicknames
- The version of yourself in other people’s dreams
- Sculptures/waxworks/snowmen
- People with the username you wanted
- People who get mistaken for you
- Reflections in mirrors/shop windows/people’s eyes
- Twins you swallowed in the womb
- The version of yourself in your dreams
- Your childhood photos
- Mispronounced you
- The you who comes up with amazing lines after an argument
- All the lies you’ve ever told about yourself
- Misremembered you
- Paintings or drawings of you
- People with the same name as you
- Doppelgängers
- Misquoted you
- Your social media presence
