What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of 'technical others' and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material.

Dieter Mersch (Prof. Dr. em.), born in 1951, studied mathematics and philosophy in Cologne, Bochum and Darmstadt. Between 2004-2013 he was a full professor of media theory and between 2013-2021 director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. Since 2018 he is also one of the presidents of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik.