Friday, May 18, 2012
A line from a song comes to mind, from the group P.M.Dawn, 'In the presence of mirrors, I come face to face with you, which is me? Which is me?'
If all philosophical questions have been answered, except for what we are thinking now, then maybe we are not thinking at all, we are being. Does an Avatar have the property to think in its state of being an Avatar. An avatar might have the capacity to think, but is that required of an avatar to actually be one? Metaphysically speaking, if one is not the mind and not the body, then all concepts of time and space collapse. All avatars might be like a chain of paper dolls that grow longer and longer and longer. Do avatars come with time limits? Are they limited by time? And does it matter. An avatar might even bend time.
In referance to avatars and pain, I think pain is a mutating avatar that is parasitic in nature. It hops simultaneously between mind, body and memory, mutating into realms of experience, real and imagined, so that the phrase 'i feel your pain,' might actually be true. Pain is a signal, a firing of neurons, who's to say the signals don't cross and land somewhere else too.
More to follow tomorrow.
Thanks,
S.
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I agree with the latter part of what you write. One of the problems in the blog I think is exactly defining what one means by an avatar; in any case, I'm not sure why "all concepts of time and space collapse" if an avatar is not mind and not body. Nothing I know of beyond the planck length makes time and space collapse; concepts might change or be altered, but they don't disappear.
ReplyDeleteWhen you say "All avatars might be like a chain of paper dolls" [...] - that's simply not true with, say, Second Life avatars or some such. You could say that about the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in the Flower Ornament Sutra though.
I'm not sure what "bending time" means outside of relativistic speed and/or black hole phenomena.
Could you pin the questions down a bit? What kinds of avatars are you talking about? Certainly, again, in terms of thought, SL avatars don't think; they can behave like bots, but they're not independent and their programming is relatively small. That doesn't mean at all that an intelligent bot might sometime come along.
Why is pain a "mutating avatar that is parasitic in nature"? Take the case of someone in a bad auto accident in terrible pain. Why bring in a (in your case I think) metaphysical entity? Nothing's mutating, the body's is reacting, closing down channels, going into trauma and shock. It's not parasitic, although you might call the accident itself parasitic and even death parasitic (which would be extremely interesting) - but the avatar itself, however defined, would be a conjunction here.
I think of pain as more than a signal; it can be a general condition of the body, flooded by signals...
And thank you!
"All avatars might be like a chain of paper dolls that grow longer and longer and longer..." this is a lovely image - fragile and yet compelling in the way that repetition and replication can be. It expresses something about digital copying but copies don't have to be tied to each other. Why the chain?
ReplyDeleteChanging tack...
An interesting question that keeps coming up for me in these discussions is why we have this impulse/desire/wish to invest avatars with more independent agency than they actually have? (whether faux-humanity or supernatural entity?) It's make-believe, but that's a very powerful thing. Make. Believe... Pygmalion myth...
I don't have this myself; I think in twenty years agency will be a major issue, maybe in much less time. right now the agency I worry about is, for example, the google relevancy formula which are 'tailored' to the user - a good way to manipulate hir, through formations of secondary narcissism...
DeleteChristine, maybe also a desire for a godhead as transitional or 'final' object - something that takes away the notion that the cosmos and our lives are meaningless, except locally. so any instantiation may well have a resonant power. the problem is when the wire frameworks are exposed...
ReplyDeleteYes, exposing the wire frameworks is very effective and affective. For me, it highlights how powerful the make believe is - and, paradoxically, can sometimes make it even more powerful. Seeing the wires, the puppet strings, the backstage machinery and scaffolding behind the scenery, but even so you can still suspend your disbelief. I like the contradiction - knowing it's an illusion and yet knowing or feeling the illusion's power nevertheless.
ReplyDeletesome of the really early Korean and Japanese virtual idol videos used exposed frameworks, going back and forth between them and sexualized 'skin' to show how the whole thing was constructed - but also to give a sense of (sexual) power over the avatar -
ReplyDeleteThinking of Kyoko Date and Diki -
I've just watched 'diki,Date Kyoko' on YouTube ( http://youtu.be/9q2oeDo11_Q ). I'd not seen any of those before. What's particularly strange (at least to me) about this one is also the way the young man at the computer, manipulating her framework and skin, becomes increasingly technologized himself - wearing goggles and hand apparatus to get closer to 'her'. Indeed his hands have to become digitized too to enter the computer that creates and controls her, and the more he becomes enchanted with her the less human he appears. Her world seems bursting with digital vibrancy and health, whereas his becomes darker, more stilted, messy and monotone. The computer warns, "Danger! Danger!" but he's the one in trouble. She's unaffected. It's almost the opposite of the Pygmalion myth. At the end he appears to become like her, rendered flawless and super smooth, smiling in digital love, swooning into the blue cgi sky, he's sucked into her world.
ReplyDeleteI thought this was fascinating - wrote an article about both of the virtual avatars at one point for a Dutch anthro magazine. And you're right of course. It's amazing how prescient this early video is - but there's often something that occurs at the birth of a new technology that seems to comprehend its future better than what comes later - I have a book on railroads from 1831 for example that predicts the future of the medium - A Practical Treatise on Railroads by Wood - then there's Tristram Shandy by Sterne, etc. When the technology's new it's quickly objectified and dissected; later, it's taken for granted. Or take Ballard's writings...
ReplyDeleteI think btw in the video you describe, he's geek-like; he's always been messy just like the sculptor of Pygmalion was messy - art-making, body-making's messy. So for me he's become more and more geek-like but cleansed of his powerlessness.