doppelgänger

In late 2009, the National Portrait Gallery in Australia launched the exhibition, doppelgänger, displayed on Portrait Island in the multi-user virtual environment of Second Life. The exhibition responds to the Gallery's on-line strategy to curate exhibitions of digital works of art that examine and challenge traditional concepts of identity and portraiture. Although doppelgänger is still in its display phase at the time of writing, this paper considers the preliminary lessons the Gallery has learned from the development of this project and the questions these raise for the role cultural institutions may play in the digital art environment.