Identical

IDENTICAL is a virtual reality exploration of human identity, symmetry, free will, and the strange boundaries between what is inherited and what is chosen.

The film was shot at the annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, where thousands of twins gather each year for what is widely described as the largest annual gathering of twins in the world. Filmed during the festival’s costume parade, IDENTICAL moves through an uncanny landscape of doubled faces, mirrored gestures, matching clothes, and bodies that seem to repeat themselves.

The work draws on the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart and the famous case of the “Jim Twins,” identical twins separated as infants whose adult lives revealed striking parallels. Their story becomes a starting point for questions about genetics, coincidence, environment, individuality, and the limits of human autonomy.

As pairs accumulate inside the headset, the film becomes a meditation on symmetry and human proximity to computers: repetition, pattern recognition, prediction, and the possibility that identity may be less singular than we imagine.