Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures

The tale of twins being reunited after a long separation is a trope that has been endlessly repeated and reworked across different cultures and throughout history, with each moment adapting the twin plot to address its current cultural tensions. In this study, Edward King demonstrates how twins are a means of exploring the social implications of hyper-connectivity and the compromising relationship between humans and digital information, their environment and their genetics. As King demonstrates, twins tell us about the changing forms of connectivity and power in contemporary culture and what new conceptions of the human they present us with. Taking account of a broad range of literary, cultural and scientific practices, Entwined Being probes discussions surrounding twins such as:

• The way in which they appear in behavioral genetics as a way of identifying inherited predispositions to social media
• How their faces interrupt biometric interfaces such as facial recognition software and undermine advances in neo-liberal surveillance systems
• How they represent the uncanny and the weird in the horror genre and how this questions ideologies of communications media and the connectivity it enables
• Their association with telepathy and cybernetics in science fiction
• Their construction as models for entangled being in ecological thought

Drawing upon the literary and filmic works of Ken Follet, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Bruce Chatwin, Shelley Jackson, Brian de Palma, Peter Greenway and David Cronenberg, as well as science fiction literature and the television series Orphan Black, King illuminates how twins are employed across a range of disciplines to envision a critical re-conception of the human in times of digital integration and ecological crisis.