There’s a recording studio in Melbourne, Australia that’s been filling up with Lindas. On the computer screen, when the Guardian visits, is an early digital Linda prototype, bathed in computer-generated grey waves. A white plaster Linda is serenely meditating in its plastic storage box. And then there’s the final form (for now at least): a silicone mask, with vacant white polystyrene voids in place of eyes.
The doppelganger has been created by avant-pop musician and visual artist Becky Freeman, aka Sui Zhen, for her new album Losing, Linda.
But while the facsimiles are expressionless, the human from which they are cast is crying.
Freeman is talking to me about watching her mother, Yih-Fye, writhe in pain from bedsores and the pancreatic cancer shutting down her internal organs. Tears fall down her cheeks as she describes delicately feeding Yih-Fye ice cubes, and staring into her mum’s medicated eyes in the moment she died.
“I think when people try and say, ‘Oh, they went away peacefully’, it’s more for them. I don’t think any of us know what actually happens for other people when they die,” says Freeman. “You’re just a body.”
These threads of mortality, digitisation and disconnection are woven through Losing, Linda: a collection of songs built around dubbed-out synths, unsettling digital waves and wobbly pop. Her last record Secretly Susan was praised by Pitchfork as “radiating charm and humour”, and for devising a visual world that was “brilliant and uncanny”.
The eponymous Susan was also a doppelganger of sorts: a saccharine caricature of the performative way people present themselves on social media; an amalgam of the surface level data describing how someone wished they appeared.
You could say Susan was the absence of depth, and Linda is the absence of surface, as Freeman continues to explore the paucity of online personalities. Linda is a golem sculpted from the memories, “life-moments”, medical records and chat room conversations we leave behind after we die. Linda is a manifestation of how a computer would remember from the scraps and fragments of yourself fed to it over the course of your life.
Losing, Linda was recorded in Japan over two artist residencies in Hokkaido and Matsudo. With its technological obsessions and high suicide rates, that country seems a fitting location for what Freeman has created: a kind of haunting Antipodean answer to animated Japanese digital pop star Hatsune Miku (its voice is created with voice synthesising software), or hyper-real PC Music avatar, QT.
But rather than trying to create a perfect simulacrum of herself with Linda, Freeman – who is also a member of Melbourne punk funk band NO ZU – intends to show the futility and horror of technology attempting to replicate life.
“[Linda’s] not really intended to be narcissistic, like wanting to create another me. It’s more to show the failings of that pursuit,” she says. “If I fed an AI all my data, what would I get? Would I get a version of myself? Or would it be a bit broken?”
You can meet Linda online where it will show you dream clips of eggs being stroked (a recurring visual motif in Freeman’s work) in exchange for some short conversation. On stage, the latex version of Linda is performed by Freeman’s sister Jessica and choreographer Megan Payne. Freeman’s creation is named after the online learning channel Lynda, and is intended as an anthropomorphic digital ghost of the disembodied data we leave to float online.
“I was [deciding] what to do with all these digital remnants of my mum, and how much of that tells me about her and what’s missing, and not just forget what she was like in person,” says Freeman.
She shows me a video of her mum filmed just four months before her death at a dragon boating championship in China (she was a multi-medal winning champion in the sport). She’s skinny and clearly unwell, but also exuberant and vivacious. Freeman says Yih-Fye – a talented scientist working for healthcare provider B. Braun – was most at peace hiking in the Blue Mountains and enjoyed taking photos of mushrooms on her phone rather than selfies.
Freeman does see the positive aspects of technology (it was through a Facebook group that the weakened Yih-Fye was able to stay connected to friends), and enjoys its creative possibilities – but she also harbours anxieties. She describes bots hacking her mum’s old Skype account to send her ghostly spam calls; the pressure to accumulate likes and comments on social media posts; and the way platforms like Snapchat and Instagram are both stretching our perception of time while making us hyper aware of every passing second.
“There seems to be value in quantity. Which I don’t necessarily think is a good thing. [Social media has] portioned peoples’ time to the second,” says Freeman, when discussing Instagram stories. “But who wants to live in a world where you’re aware of 15 seconds?”
Losing, Linda isn’t a grief album (that album comes later); rather it helped Freeman to process the trauma of her mother’s death, re-assess her relationship to technology, and remember to cherish the complexity of bodies and life in the physical world – just as Yih-Fye did.
• Losing, Linda is out now through Remote Control Records. Sui Zhen is touring nationally throughout September, October and November