Sunday, May 20, 2012
Alright guys, i'm going to ask...forgive me, if its been asked before, but what is an avatar? Personally, i have grown up with the concept of avatars as manifestations of a supreme power, and as a child growing up Hindu, avatars were always accepted as a part of our faith, as something that has always existed and always will. Having said that, these avatars are supposedly part of the same thing, are supposedly simultaneous, and are connected to one thing, hence my feeling of everything collapsing into one thing, like a point of light. With the advent of the internet, avatars have come to mean so many things. And then of coarse there are movies like avatar, etc., that have thrown the concept into the public realm for even more interpretation. So here, in this blogging space, when we speak of avatars, what do we mean?
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We've talked about this, I think somewhere towards the beginning, hard to find in the blog. There are two uses here; I'm coming from the Second Life or virtual world use - a representation of a player or virtual world inhabitant or other form of self, online - which can mean the Internet or other computer network. It's also been used here to refer to apparitions and to avatars in the sense you're using it above. I think of the movie Avatar (which I disliked, except for the tech - too much American colonialism for me) as an example of the former - the main character is 'embodied' in another who carries out his actions etc., but it's he who still is thinking in another's body. So in this sense the avatar is a proxy.
ReplyDeletePeople online tend to identify with 'their' avatars or representations, but a lot of artists use their avatars differently, as functions or symbols within an online performance or video.
Of course the original usage with Hindu, which confuses the issue since an online avatar isn't sentient.
So part of the blog is sorting this out. My own take has been looking at both modes of performance and embodiment in virtual worlds, and thinking about the psychology or psychoanalytics etc. about the human user in relationship to this. An avatar can't 'really' be anorectic; a human can.
Hope this helps - I may have some of the description wrong. Can you say more about 'everything collapsing into one thing'...?
Thanks, Alan
Alan, thanks. This helps clear things for me. But then what exactly do you mean by anorectic?You can't mean an avatar with a loss of appetite? Or do you mean avatars that are diminished? Am confused about this.
ReplyDeleteHi - just got this message as well; for some reason, gmail has been acting up and I'm not sure where the comments are placed.
ReplyDeleteanorectic avatars are really impossible; I was thinking about the 'thinness' of their dimensionality in virtual worlds, their transparency - if you move your viewpoint to the interior of an avatar for example, it just disappears. it's as if it was gnawed away. so I meant it as kind of a disorder of the real (oddly, the title of one of my books). I've known severe anorectics, by the way, and there can be a horror connected with the disease, which can kill, so I'm aware of this aspect, this uncanny horror that relates to thinking of them (in virtual worlds) as too 'real.' Hope this helps, and apologies for writing back so late; if I'm missing any other comments or posts, please let me know! Thanks, Alan