Art and the Liminal: Imagination, Liminality and Avatar-Mediated Presence
Symposium:
- ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art
- More presentations from ISEA2011:
Session Title:
- Travels Through Hyper-Liminality: Exploring the space where digital meets the real
Presentation Title:
- Art and the Liminal: Imagination, Liminality and Avatar-Mediated Presence
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: Travels Through Hyper-Liminality: Exploring the space where digital meets the real
The ease in which we experience the liminal through technology mediated virtual space is even more pronounced when the space is avatar-mediated creating an oscillating state of existence between the virtual and the physical. Yet both consciousness and the imagination depend on this liminality of space. With a focus on the ‘threshold’ this continual ‘about to become’ is almost a necessary condition of being. Some virtual environments (or worlds) deliberately play with this ‘existential overlay to the physical’ (Lichty 2009: 2). Working with a new framework of the emergent imagination consideration is given to the transitional spaces created in artworks in virtual world spaces where aspects of the liminal come to the fore. This paper considers to what extent we can examine imaginative or liminal states that are, as Edward Casey notes, ‘remarkably easy to enter into’, yet their ‘very ephemerality renders [them] resistant to conceptual specification of a precise sort’ (Casey 2000: 6- 7). The paper considers to what extent transitional spaces share similar characteristics to the liminal. Does the liminal always find the point of the threshold? Does avatar-mediation (re)space the imagination to a place geographically distant from the body? Do we experience liminality in a similar way? Or is the liminal more closely bound to the temporal? To what extent are both conditioned by the virtual? The relationship between the transitional and liminal, and the avatar experience, sets out a particular view of the imagination and its elusive, and sometimes liminal, qualities.