Greetings empyreans!
What follows is a cut and paste summation of the first half of my essay, An Avatar Manifesto. A little background on what led me to this point......Through the 80's I was a painter working with installations, shaped canvases; all related to post-cubist, synchronous investigations of the human body and spatial disruption, multi points of view, etc. In 1989 I met Jarion Lanier, and had my first experience with VR, using an HMD and dataglove. Although the world I was in was very unimaginative, and Jarion's rhetoric far to utopian for my world view, I was enthralled by the potentials, problems, and questions this new space offered, and by the sense of embodiment, or bodily awareness I experienced when in VR. For me it was, among other things, an extremely physical experience. One of the first things that occurred to me was the question of self-representation in these spaces, and the constellation of possibilities that came with that. With no computer experience or training, I dropped the paint brushes and began to investigate this zone, first producing a number of images I called "identity constructions", which can be found at: http://art.bgsu.edu/~glittle/IDs.html After several years, these constructions came into existence on the internet, in the form of 2d and 3d chatrooms, under the label of avatars. I later wrote the manifesto.
I hope to spend maybe half my time here discussing the manifesto, but since it was written a few years ago and much has changed (and much has not) since then, if the flow of discussion permits,spend the other half addressing my current work, gaming, and what happened to the avatar?
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Cut and paste Synopsis of Part One of "An Avatar Manifesto"
"AVATARA-Sanskrit.; ava-'down', tarati-'he goes,
passes beyond' literally, 'a descent', a conception described in the Bhagavad
gita, 4th Teaching, 1-8 where Krishna confides: "when goodness grows weak, when
evil increases, I make myself a body." (OED)"
"Originally referring to
the incarnation of Hindu deities, avatars in the computing realms have come to
mean any of the various "strap-on" visual agents that represent the user in
increasing numbers of 2 and 3D worlds. (Lonehead, par. 3)"
to compare
the avatar to the cyborg......
"The term cyborg was coined in 1960
with the appearance of "Cyborgs in Space" by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S.
Kline. Clynes and Kline argued that altering man's bodily functions to meet the
requirements of extraterrestrial environments was more logical than providing a
controlled environment for him in space. Their "self-regulating
artifact-organism" (Clynes and Kline 31-33) would be free to explore space
without remaining anchored to a cumbersome artificial environment: "Solving the
many technical problems involved in manned space flight by adapting man to his
environment rather than vice versa, will not only mark a significant step
forward in man's scientific progress, but may well provide a new and larger
dimension for man's spirit as well" (Clynes and Kline 33). This early cyborg is
the human enhanced, a hybrid physical construction of wetware, hardware, and
software who is without conscious effort able to adjust its homeostatic
mechanisms to provide stable if not superior operation in a variety of friendly
and unfriendly environments. The cyborg incorporates body and prostheses in the
forms of mechanical, optical, coded, pharmacological, electronic, telematic,
genetic, and biological agents, hosted by an original human consciousness to
form a unified but hybrid lived body.
and the digital avatar........
In contrast, the avatar is a mythic figure with its origin in
one world and projected or passing through a form of representation appropriate
to a parallel world. The avatar is a delegate, a tool or instrument allowing an
agency to transmit signification to a parallel world. The cyborg and the avatar,
then, share the purpose of facilitating operation in another environment. The
cyborg has been described as a unified but hybrid "other," whereas the avatar is
born of a telematic split; the original remains in its originary environment
while sending a tool of signification, the avatar, into a second. In that it
never detaches from its referent, the user, the avatar differs as well from
virtual software agents produced by artificial intelligence and neural networks.
It is not independent and does not in itself learn. The avatar is inseparable in
nature from its host, the human user. The virtual avatar is software. Its
conditions are those of a coded environment. The avatar is essentially a visual
representation, a virtual instrument or imaged prosthesis of its referent-the
user, and so fundamentally related to linguistic signs and representational
icons. In this sense, the population of avatars could come to include the
history of portraiture in painting, photography, and sculpture, as a projection
or passing through of once living individuals into the virtual, timeless space
of representation, metaphor, and mimesis. .........It is in the very space of
choice, from highly personal to non-consensual, that the unique power of the
avatar is problematized. The most significant use of the avatar is the freeing
of personal identity from outmoded relationships to consistency and social
consensus. The "strap-on" (Lonehead , par. 3) persona, the irrelevance of
grounding identity in communal agreement, and the "wholesale appropriation of
the other" (Stone 83) open the self to new territories of signification,
connection, desire, and empowerment."
Gregory Little
Visiting Professor of Digital
Arts
Bowling Green State University
Visiting Artist/Researcher
The
Innovation and Virtual Reality Centre
The University of Teesside,
UK
glittle@oberlin.net
http://art.bgsu.edu/~glittle
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