Lib­er­ate Your Avatar: The Rev­o­lu­tion will be So­cially Net­worked


Symposium:


Session Title:
  • Travels Through Hyper-Liminality: Exploring the space where digital meets the real

Presentation Title:
  • Lib­er­ate Your Avatar: The Rev­o­lu­tion will be So­cially Net­worked

Presenter(s):


Venue(s):


Abstract:

  • Panel: Travels Through Hyper-Liminality: Exploring the space where digital meets the real

    This pre­sen­ta­tion pro­vides a cre­ative-prac­ti­cal per­spec­tive on Sec­ond Life through a sur­vey of my work as a vi­sual artist, set against a the­o­ret­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal back­drop that com­bines post­struc­tural­ism and semi­otics. My prac­ti­cal ex­am­ples of merged and cre­ated Sec­ond Lives draw on my mixed-re­al­ity in­stal­la­tions in the form of en­coun­ters be­tween Sec­ond Life and First Life. My aim is to pro­vide a vi­sual back­drop and prac­ti­cal ex­am­ples to this un­der­ly­ing the­o­ret­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal dis­course, where the dis­em­bod­ied par­tic­i­pant and (re)-em­bod­ied avatar in my in­stal­la­tions find them­selves in an in­creas­ingly so­cial and po­lit­i­cal sec­ond life con­text. Whereas the un­der­ly­ing the­o­ret­i­cal frame­work of this pre­sen­ta­tion clearly iden­ti­fies a num­ber of crit­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal stand­points rang­ing from a post­struc­tural­ist po­si­tion that fol­lows the lin­guis­tic and semi­otic guid­ing prin­ci­ples of de Saus­sure to the for­ma­tion of the ego in re­la­tion to the body image in Lacan’s mir­ror stage, it is the artis­tic out­comes of my own prac­ticed-based re­search that iden­ti­fies and pro­nounces these the­o­ret­i­cal stances within my art in­stal­la­tions. Through the de­vel­op­ment of these artis­tic works since the early 1990s a philo­soph­i­cal dis­course has emerged through ex­pe­ri­ence and prac­tice rather than ini­ti­ated by the­ory alone, but one that is now com­pletely en­twined where as an artist I feel both the the­ory and prac­tice are at the fore­front of my work.

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