Abstract watercolour and ink painting, part of the New Biology series which explores nature's self-organising ecosystems and the new technological equivalents.

What if we could create digital copies of ourselves that live on after we die? Advances in artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces are making this a real possibility. From scraping our digital footprint to extracting impulses directly from the brain, some technology already exists to make digital approximations of ourselves.

Would our digital doppelgänger simply be a weak copy of ourselves? Or could it become a richer, more complex being than we could ever hope to be? Are we simply the sum of our perceptions, memories, and biological reactions to stimuli, or something more?

This painting depicts two similar abstract entities, one more complex and layered than the other. But which is the original and which is the copy?