Digital Twin Protocol
Digital Twin Protocol is a LARP workshop designed by artist & psychotherapist Bea Xu that reinterprets & ritualises a counter-surveillance praxis document devised by ‘Mark Wayne’ and posted in a leftist Telegram group for dissemination in 2024.
Over the course of 2-4 hours, 9+ players use everyday devices and online platforms to engage in a LARP that gamifies the act of seizing narrative control over the characterisation of their ‘digital twins’ (simulations of our identity constructed out of our online data that can be used by companies like Palantir to predict our behaviour). Using analogue techniques to construct new ‘sub-personalities’ within these digital twins that are full of internal contradictions and inconsistencies, wholly different to their physical selves, the protocol implicitly teaches players how to data poison the algorithm in order to evade its capture on an individual, household and ultimately community-wide level.
Drawing on clinical frameworks from Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Psychosynthesis to think about intrapsychic parts and identities, Bea is developing a burgeoning ‘alter-reality roleplay’ methodology through Digital Twin Protocol that allows participants to use play to leverage the epistemological fragmentation and accelerating novelty that communicative capitalism has put upon us as a temporary mode of adaptation before that window of possibility is closed down.
The playtest and first iteration of the protocol took place at Eaton Hotel, Hong Kong as part of Institution of Niche’s Retrograde Divination Protocols in November 2025.
More documentation coming soon.