This audiovisual multimedia composition references Luigi Pirandello’s psychological novel Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, No One and One Hundred Thousand), recontextualised for the digital present. Through the protagonist’s monologue, Pirandello reflects on the impossibility of interpreting reality in a univocal way, particularly regarding subjective identity. The protagonist realises there are a hundred thousand versions of himself in the eyes of others; he is not the singular self he believed himself to be and ultimately recognises none, resembling no one. I extend this by adding un milione (a million), representing digital identities. If there are a hundred thousand interpretations of the self offline, there are millions online: followers, social media profiles, algorithmic selves (Lee et al., 2022), and imagined or aspirational selves shaped by advertising.
In contemporary digital culture, the self itself becomes commodified and abstracted. As Baudrillard argues in The System of Objects (1996), we increasingly consume the idea of things rather than the things themselves, like designer clothes. Objects become images of us, reducing cultural and natural forms to reified signs for consumption and spectacle (Kellner, 1989). Online, this intensifies and the self becomes an 'augmented self' (nathanjurgenson, 2011), producing further alienation, as the subject disperses across mediated representations.