Liberate Your Avatar: The Revolution will be Socially Networked
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:
- 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.