[-empyre-] [-empyre-]:An Avatar Manifesto::final

["Gregory Little" <glittle@oberlin.net>]

Here is the final post of the Avatar Manifesto:

Also welcome are any comments on the current condition of the avatar, online
identity, viractualism, etc. are welcome!
I will be on the road until Tuesday night, but at that point will catch up
loose ends and respond to any new posts.


Images of my early avatars (1991-1995) are available at:
http://art.bgsu.edu/~glittle/avamenu.html

The VRML avatar generator (1996-7) at:
http://art.bgsu.edu/~glittle/idgene.wrl

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

5.0. Manifesto

This Manifesto is a call to artists, netomanics, software, hardware, and
wetware designers, creative directors, teachers, scientists, slackers,
hackers, CEOs, students, cyborgs, zombies, vampires, working groups,
technology officers, specialists, politicians, surgeons, doctors, rappers,
rockers, and clowns, a call to cast off the dumbing-down manacles of
wholistics, universals, boundaries, acceptablilities, salvations, moral
imperatives, family values, personal fantasies, dualisms, and "the God
trick" (Penley and Ross, 1991, 16). Let us make ourselves an unconsumable,
signifying, body without organs. The partial, the schizoid, the nomadic and
local are threats to the primacy of capital. Fragmentation, irregularity,
dissolution, hybridity, swarming, and wandering stubbornly are lethal
weapons against globalization. The displacement of the self by the commodity
insures the survival of the commodity and the perpetuation of the processes
of accumulation. The movement of capital into the avatar is an inevitable
part of capitalism's infinite return. It represents nothing less than the
wholesale loss of the possibility of liberation and awareness of the
processes of production and accumulation. The dominant, "universal" myths,
psychologies, sciences, philosophies, religions, and economies that form the
New World Order perpetuate impulse disorder through the abhorrence of
partiality and the resultant movement outward toward the object of capital
in the guise of the illusion of wholeness. We have come to believe that we
are imperfect, incomplete creatures and that completion, oneness, and
wholeness is the Goal. It is this argument that permits the inscribing of
production across consciousness at the expense of tolerance, difference, and
free desire. We are partial, parts of a network of drifts. We slip across a
curved matrix whose beginning is everywhere, whose center is nowhere, and
whose diameter is infinite. We are unable to perceive a whole or pattern, we
participate and form tendencies. We can connect and disconnect from desire's
conduit without risk or loss, there is nothing to measure or acquire.
Through the dismantling of the neurosis of the individual, alienated self,
the celebration of locality and partiality, and the unbinding of our
consciousness from dilemmas of bifurcation, the lust for uniformity, and the
impulse disorders of lack-based desire; we can experience "a joy that is
immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its
contemplations, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not
measured by pleasure since it distributes intensities of pleasure and
prevents us from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt" (Deleuze and
Guattari , A Thousand Plateaus, 155). At present our collective social body
is paralyzed by loss. Like an amputee dreaming about a phantom limb we
re-remember our irrevocable body, we hallucinate its presence, long for its
return, wait to wake up from the nightmare. We must move on from the
bifurcating past and build a new body.

5.1. Imaging Wildcards
[Figure 2. Composite]
The avatar signifies through the visual as an image. As postmodern artwork,
the avatar signifies in a public sphere (the Web), is a social
representation that can be both target and weapon. The postmodern artist is
less a producer of rarified objects than a manipulator of visual codes,
social signs, and media images (Foster, 1985). Particular kinds of marks,
styles, images, and forms have come to signify modes of expression or
feeling, like the spiritual, the personal, the expressive, the exotic, and
high or low culture. These elements form a system of signs, tropes, or codes
for the artist to manipulate and combine. The social and virtual context of
the Web distances the artist entirely from the production of the corporeal
art object and frees her for the activity of coding/recoding. This activity
often gives attention to the particular institutional framework or site in
order to reveal how an exhibition context participates in the construction
of the meaning and audience of the art object. The signifying avatar will
take a resistant, reactive position relative to its institutional context,
the commodified Web. The strategies available to the avatar include: 1) the
freedom of choice of self-image and the lack of need for consensus relative
to self imaging; this frees the avatar from any singular representation and
opens the individual to a plurality of possibilities; 2) an emphasis on
radical embodiment, on all that is the literal body, and on all that it is
to be grounded in the body at the expense of social, biological, cultural,
economic, psychoanalytic, and religious discourse; this can free the
individual from lack-based desire and myths of wholeness and transcendence
that cause us to abandon the body to rehabitation by capital; and 3) drawing
from various alternative narratives of abjection, the alien, and the other;
this can offer us visual and procedural models for constructing unconsumable
images.
To combine visual codes, signifying signs, and social images into avatars
that take a combative stance toward the forces of capital:
1. Seek, rarify, and valorize disintegration and instability
[Figure 3. Photoshop]
2. Resist unified identity relative to race, gender, age, human, animal, or
machine
[Figure 4. Satyr]
3. Refuse participation in wholeness and actively dismantle myths of
transcendentalism
[Figure 5. Garth]
4. Create tensions and conflicts through the simultaneous presentation of
the desiring subject and the fetishized object of desire [Figure 6. The
Enforcer] 5. Draw from narratives of abjection, the alien, and the other
[Figure 7]
6. Pierce the skin, do the taboo, show the insides, destroy the
internal/external binary
[Figure 8. The Clown]
7. Refuse the temptation to succumb to the slick, seamless special effects
of emergent technology
[Figure 9]
8. Avoid personal or social fantasy, step out of bounds, lose your
boundaries altogether
[Figure 10. Dolly]
9. Avoid mystery, make analysis of the unconscious impossible, be hyper
literal
[Figure 11]
10. Use images that speak of hyperembodiment, of extremes of physicality,
like the visceral, the abject, the defiled, and the horrific
[Figure 12]
The avatar offers a new territory for understanding ourselves. Let us
construct the avatar as a revolutionary site of resistance inside the belly
of an armed-to-the-teeth multinational monster of exchange. Polymorphic,
bi-gendered, unstable nomadic, pained and maimed representations of the self
as subject could act, in Donna Haraway's terms, as "trickster figures,"
"potent wild cards" to undermine, infect, and terrorize the monster from the
inside out. The avatar is thus born of the dialectic of the body
simultaneously as the idealized, commodified body of capital; and as the
abject, transgressive, hyper-visceral embodied body. This is a call to build
avatars, computers, images, discourses, and relationships that refuse and
subvert the "self exterminating impulses of the discourses of disembodiment"
(Sobchack 314). This is a call to joy, the joy of mortality, partiality, and
finality; a call to the lived body of desire.


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