Submitted by Tim Jackson: What happens when someone’s reality hacking becomes your doppelganger…
Two Bejars
by Kelefa Sanneh
The New Yorker
March 21, 2011
It was six o”™clock when Daniel Bejar presented himself at the security desk of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The man behind the counter looked up and said, “May I see your I.D.?” Bejar produced his driver”™s license. The man scanned it into the system and then frowned. “Did you lose the pass you already had?”
Bejar smiled and shook his head.
“We gave you a pass and took your picture earlier, right?”
Bejar stopped smiling. A woman appeared and asked a question that was not a question: “Daniel, can you come this way?” They disappeared into an office, from which she made urgent phone calls: “The gentleman that”™s here has the same name as a gentleman that”™s already checked in.”
Bejar had anticipated the confusion. He is an artist with a wide mischievous streak. For one project, “Get Lost!,” he replaced New York City subway maps with versions that had a slightly different coastline and no names or markings””he wanted to evoke the city as it might have looked in 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed past. Four years ago, Bejar received an effusive e-mail from a man in southern Ontario, a self-described “musical enthusiast”; apparently, the man had meant to reach a different Daniel Bejar, a singer and songwriter from Vancouver who leads a band called Destroyer. Bejar studied up on Bejar. “I was, like, all right””we”™re going to share this for the rest of our lives,” Bejar said. “He”™s not going to stop making music, and I”™m not going to stop making art. But it took a while for me to figure out what to do.” Continue reading “Daniel Bejar’s Double Trouble”