Proteus Effect is a term coined by researchers Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson in 2007, named after Proteus—a shapeshifting Greek god. It describes a phenomenon where virtual stimuli mold and dictate an individual’s self-representation and perception; where a person’s cultivated virtual self (their avatar) and its set of idiosyncrasies inversely influences their behaviors IRL. The series explores what it means to cultivate a presence and operate in a complex, hyperreal digital realm and its implications beyond that, with collaborator Nova A, a queer Muslim Bangladeshi activist and model. With every image as a portal, the fragmented digital selves navigate a malleable reality while being cognizant and critical of power structures that are encoded within technology. My research involves deconstructing ways in which technology has historically been tethered to settler colonial violence, racism and misogyny for creating extractive, hierarchical and nefarious systems and its big ramifications for our time. As an antidote, the series uses atavistic threads to weave together hyperreal tableaus imbued with a wide span of ancestral altars to reimagine digital lives and in-turn IRL equitable pathways towards being. The digital world can be a realm to metamorphose and create agency for marginalized persons but it is also a realm populated with mirrored oppressive forces, for example in the form of baked-in algorithmic biases, discriminatory facial recognition systems, censorship and surveillance. With the proliferation of bots, deep fake technology, the ubiquity of AI and lives subsumed by the lure of social media, the real and virtual are coalescing and becoming increasingly indiscernible. IRL, as in the digital realm, Black and Brown folks are surveilled and made invisible simultaneously, through erasure and omission, multitudes are made monolithic. The series investigates how the amorphous digital sphere, mediated through photography can be an avenue for embracing individual and collective multiplicities, and a conduit towards reimagining.