lola420 x johndoe887 //
(a) screen play //
Installation art piece exploring digital identity, avatars, and connection.
Can you solve the puzzle?
This project explores the space between avatar and user, examining how digital personas shape presence and connection within fictive cyberspace.
Presented at Borderland 2025 as part of the live installation Unicode Camgirl, the work unfolds as a digitally mediated dialogue, structured like a traditional screenplay but experienced through fragmented text interfaces.
Visitors discovered the conversation by physically sorting through documents hidden within manila folders, intended as a tactile experience of piecing together digital traces of connection.
Through layered conversations between lola420 and johndoe887, the piece investigates the tension between real and fake, treats data as emotional currency, and questions how interaction design quietly shapes intimacy in digital relationships.
about
interaction design,
persona development,
installation art
role
tools
figma, messagemockup,
photoshop
year: 2025
In digital spaces, we perform ourselves through curated identities that obscure and reveal in equal measure. lola420 x johndoe887 stages this tension as a screenplay where the actors are usernames and the stage is a screen.
The interaction was designed to feel familiar yet unsettling, like encountering a private conversation you're not meant to see, and therefore the layout was fragmented with messages appearing out of sequence.
The project emphasizes the performative nature of digital identity itself and asks questions like the following:
What happens to intimacy when mediated through text?
How does interface design shape the emotional texture of connection?
Where does the avatar end and the person begin?
approach
I wanted the viewer to start getting to know the users behind the avatar through details and patterns.
Our presence may be channeled through a screen, but interfaces also leak. Battery percentage, local time, connection strength, choice of network… this metadata reveal what avatars try to hide, namely the material conditions of digital presence (and I couldn’t help but add a little nod to William Gibson’s Neuromancer.)
By foregrounding these clues, lola420 x johndoe887 made visible the bodies behind the usernames.
I was especially interested in Lola as she was not only an avatar but a performer, a surface for the projections of the user interacting with her.
Taken together, the conversation was intended to become more than text. It became evidence of two lives, meeting in the gap between timezones and battery percentages.
revealing the body behind the avatar
The conversation between lola420 and johndoe887 opens onto larger questions about digital intimacy, power dynamics, and mediated presence:
Digital intimacy: How do we form connections through screens? What's lost and what's amplified when physical presence is removed? What becomes possible once we're free to curate what others see from us?
Data as currency: Every message, every "seen" notification, every pause… these become units of emotional exchange. The design of chat windows, typing indicators, read receipts are never neutral. These interface elements can shape expectation, create anxiety, or generate meaning.
Interface as mediator: Would John seek this connection in the physical world? What feels "real" shifts when mediated by a screen. The interface doesn't just display the relationship, it creates the conditions under which the relationship becomes possible.
Avatar as performance: lola420 and johndoe887 are both personas and people. The work traverses that uncomfortable middle space where performance and authenticity blur. The more time they spend interacting, the more an actual relationship appears.
themes explored
Originally presented at Borderland 2025 as part of the interactive performance piece Unicode Camgirl by Amanda Widegren (@amandapropaganda), the work existed as printed text sheets hidden inside manila folders. As curator and coordinator for Unicode Camgirl, I developed this screenplay component to provide a textual counterpoint to the live performance elements.
Visitors discovered the conversation by physically sorting through documents, intended as a tactile experience of piecing together fragments. The portfolio pictures above presents a digital reconstruction, translating the physical archive into an interface that preserves the fragmentary, non-linear nature of the original.
exhibition context
Creating lola420 and johndoe887 required the same embodied thinking I bring to all my work: stepping into someone else's physical and emotional reality to understand how they move through systems.
I wanted to understand the characters behind their screens. When is lola420 awake? When does her phone die? What does she gain from this transaction? What does John need? The personas emerged through constraints such as battery life and network speed. These details were the initial material conditions shaping what intimacy could look like between them.
This process deepened my interest in how digital systems shape human behavior in terms of emotional intimacy. The interface structures what's possible within different relationships, and we always leave a trail of digital dust behind.