TechTonic - Flux Issue 6 - Avatar and Golem, Inc.

Morningstar's decidedly secular use of the term in the mid-eighties as meaning "players" within the virtual Habitat world, realised on the shared screens of some hundreds of Commodore 64 computers, allowed their avatars bank accounts, weapons and talk bubbles above their heads replacing the text-based dungeons and dragons role playing and other text MUDs with 2D animated characters and virtual "sets" filling out and unfolding into entire virtual worlds. This vision is a model we are still familiar 15 years later in worlds such as the palace.com, and to a lesser extent in the newer 3D worlds of today.

Morningstar and his collaborators came away from the project with the overwhelming impression that existing human failings and preoccupations mapped pervasively onto this new frontier - and squabbles over the rights of avatars within Habitat soon assumed primary importance to its operation. Rather than a realm where new ways of being would create new ways of interacting, he found it more "like governing a real nation". Incidentally Habitat came to life again many years later assisted by Morningstar in the form of the 2D VisMOO, thepalace.com, where many innovative uses of avatars have been realised (even the staging of Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot).

However the metaphysical legacy of the avatar's ancient past can also feed into neo-transcendentalist and crypto-religious ideas and movements that may confuse and corrupt the thoughts and practices of those given to that sort thing, and occasionally to those who are otherwise quite rational and cogent.

The theological, Platonic, and more recently, Cartesian, formulation of existence as split between the physicality of the body and "natural" world - and the metaphysicality of the "soul" or perhaps the mind (and perhaps therefore also, the "un-natural") - also feeds into the Hans Moravec, Stelarc, Francis Heylighen and even William Gibson ideology of the post-human, at its extreme epitomised by the Extropians, all seeking to leave an “obsolete” body behind; to achieve (an unlikely) "escape velocity" from earthly corruption and limitation, as Mark Dery called it in his book by the same name.

In a pattern that reoccurs throughout our human interactions via avatars, atavistic metaphysical tendencies haunt the language and conceptualisations of the virtual world, a subject dealt with in the writings of David Tomas on shamanism and rites of passage. Maybe it comes with the territory of the unterritorialised; the virtual - a space devoid of meaning and hence more open to the ephemeral and unknown - and thereby attractive to the metaphysician in us all.

Like a kind of digital imaginary then, the avatar can be seen as a databased Rorschach ink blot that generates many meanings: it invites many interpretations; it evokes an imagined, preferred and possibly fantastical set of qualities or attributes not available in physical form. And it can be "brought to a kind of life" before the eyes and ears of others - the audience; before the other online users at the ends of the physical wires and non-physical radio waves and data streams.

It is also the form of mediation, a bridge, between One and an Other, between host and avatar; a representation, agent, go-between, mask, role, fashion, costume, disguise, delusion, illusion, analogue, simulacra or synthetic identity - and many other similar words that denote something that is not what it is, or something that is not what it appears to be.

And for us to play in this zone of fluid representation - a zone eminently suitable to artists and creators in the digital realm as it has been a realm of exploration for thousands of years in art, philosophy and metaphysics - is also to begin to further and uniquely explore - and hopefully better understand - the language and structure of representation itself, a skill that would fit snugly into our telematic toolkits in this age of increasingly technological augmentation of the human being, and of being human.

Indeed, Bahktin's idea of art - as being the transference of subjectivity between the artist and the audience - seems to evince further connections between the practice of creative art, and the creative practices of the avatar builder. The artist/builder is the host, and the “end users” or receivers, its audience.

Unfortunately such skills can also be configured as a powerful implement of distanciation, collateralisation, intervention, surveillance and (remote) control. It will not be without a fight that this distancing can be made less isolating; that this cyber-collateralisation can be resisted with more tightly coupled, shared, engaging and empathetic experiences. The struggle for cyber openness and democracy will require that intervention and surveillance be ameliorated by open systems, good governance and inspiring and engaging education; and remote control complicated, challenged and reversed - as many cyberspace world builders and arts practitioners are attempting through their work.

The avatar also implies the existence of an avatar-space or cyber-space; of a space virtualised and imagined as digital worlds ecologically suitable for the proliferation - and perhaps evolution - of its digital flora and fauna. And within and between these spaces communities of interest are spawned, just as, in an uncanny way, the collapsing wave function of quantum mechanics is said to spawn a proliferation of universes at each moment of action in the physical world.

Unlike those quantum monadic and autonomous physical multiverses which may never - or perhaps rarely - be experienced by ourselves, these non-physical virtual worlds are open, available and taking bookings now in thousands of different forms on the web. Others will delve into these new digital environments in their work, my interest however, has been focussed on the digital golems of this virtual domain.

And so there is a lengthy lineage to the avatar, even though, as they say, the best is yet to come. Its rich past and its place at the nexus between so many of aspects of, and problems inherent in, creation, identity, connection and communication, means it is also imbued with and determined by human social and cultural history, processes and systems. An so it consequently paradoxically embodies ideas of power and powerlessness, magic and technology, illusion and reality, real and virtual, self and other.

The avatar is a stand-in for the real, but can take on aspects of the real; it is a metaphor and representation of the self but it is also part or an extension of the self with some old and some new powers of the self; it is "actually" not what it stands for - but it stands for something nonetheless through our suspension of disbelief that invests it with lifelike verisimilitude and an "artificial authenticity"; and finally it is a new and godlike Promethean self just as it is also anchored securely and inextricably to the ancient human body, and its imperfect past, present and future.

Avatar and Golem, Inc. (Part 3)
Morningstar's decidedly secular use of the term in the mid-eighties as meaning "players" within the virtual Habitat world, realised on the shared screens of some hundreds of Commodore 64 computers, allowed their avatars bank accounts, weapons and talk bubbles above their heads replacing the text-based dungeons and dragons role playing and other text MUDs with 2D animated characters and virtual "sets" filling out and unfolding into entire virtual worlds. This vision is a model we are still familiar 15 years later in worlds such as the palace.com, and to a lesser extent in the newer 3D worlds of today. Morningstar and his collaborators came away from the project with the overwhelming impression that existing human failings and preoccupations mapped pervasively onto this new frontier - and squabbles over the rights of avatars within Habitat soon assumed primary importance to its operation. Rather than a realm where new ways of being would create new ways of interacting, he found it more "like governing a real nation". Incidentally Habitat came to life again many years later assisted by Morningstar in the form of the 2D VisMOO, thepalace.com, where many innovative uses of avatars have been realised (even the staging of Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot). However the metaphysical legacy of the avatar's ancient past can also feed into neo-transcendentalist and crypto-religious ideas and movements that may confuse and corrupt the thoughts and practices of those given to that sort thing, and occasionally to those who are otherwise quite rational and cogent. The theological, Platonic, and more recently, Cartesian, formulation of existence as split between the physicality of the body and "natural" world - and the metaphysicality of the "soul" or perhaps the mind (and perhaps therefore also, the "un-natural") - also feeds into the Hans Moravec, Stelarc, Francis Heylighen and even William Gibson ideology of the post-human, at its extreme epitomised by the Extropians, all seeking to leave an “obsolete” body behind; to achieve (an unlikely) "escape velocity" from earthly corruption and limitation, as Mark Dery called it in his book by the same name. In a pattern that reoccurs throughout our human interactions via avatars, atavistic metaphysical tendencies haunt the language and conceptualisations of the virtual world, a subject dealt with in the writings of David Tomas on shamanism and rites of passage. Maybe it comes with the territory of the unterritorialised; the virtual - a space devoid of meaning and hence more open to the ephemeral and unknown - and thereby attractive to the metaphysician in us all. Like a kind of digital imaginary then, the avatar can be seen as a databased Rorschach ink blot that generates many meanings: it invites many interpretations; it evokes an imagined, preferred and possibly fantastical set of qualities or attributes not available in physical form. And it can be "brought to a kind of life" before the eyes and ears of others - the audience; before the other online users at the ends of the physical wires and non-physical radio waves and data streams. It is also the form of mediation, a bridge, between One and an Other, between host and avatar; a representation, agent, go-between, mask, role, fashion, costume, disguise, delusion, illusion, analogue, simulacra or synthetic identity - and many other similar words that denote something that is not what it is, or something that is not what it appears to be. And for us to play in this zone of fluid representation - a zone eminently suitable to artists and creators in the digital realm as it has been a realm of exploration for thousands of years in art, philosophy and metaphysics - is also to begin to further and uniquely explore - and hopefully better understand - the language and structure of representation itself, a skill that would fit snugly into our telematic toolkits in this age of increasingly technological augmentation of the human being, and of being human. Indeed, Bahktin's idea of art - as being the transference of subjectivity between the artist and the audience - seems to evince further connections between the practice of creative art, and the creative practices of the avatar builder. The artist/builder is the host, and the “end users” or receivers, its audience. Unfortunately such skills can also be configured as a powerful implement of distanciation, collateralisation, intervention, surveillance and (remote) control. It will not be without a fight that this distancing can be made less isolating; that this cyber-collateralisation can be resisted with more tightly coupled, shared, engaging and empathetic experiences. The struggle for cyber openness and democracy will require that intervention and surveillance be ameliorated by open systems, good governance and inspiring and engaging education; and remote control complicated, challenged and reversed - as many cyberspace world builders and arts practitioners are attempting through their work. The avatar also implies the existence of an avatar-space or cyber-space; of a space virtualised and imagined as digital worlds ecologically suitable for the proliferation - and perhaps evolution - of its digital flora and fauna. And within and between these spaces communities of interest are spawned, just as, in an uncanny way, the collapsing wave function of quantum mechanics is said to spawn a proliferation of universes at each moment of action in the physical world. Unlike those quantum monadic and autonomous physical multiverses which may never - or perhaps rarely - be experienced by ourselves, these non-physical virtual worlds are open, available and taking bookings now in thousands of different forms on the web. Others will delve into these new digital environments in their work, my interest however, has been focussed on the digital golems of this virtual domain. And so there is a lengthy lineage to the avatar, even though, as they say, the best is yet to come. Its rich past and its place at the nexus between so many of aspects of, and problems inherent in, creation, identity, connection and communication, means it is also imbued with and determined by human social and cultural history, processes and systems. An so it consequently paradoxically embodies ideas of power and powerlessness, magic and technology, illusion and reality, real and virtual, self and other. The avatar is a stand-in for the real, but can take on aspects of the real; it is a metaphor and representation of the self but it is also part or an extension of the self with some old and some new powers of the self; it is "actually" not what it stands for - but it stands for something nonetheless through our suspension of disbelief that invests it with lifelike verisimilitude and an "artificial authenticity"; and finally it is a new and godlike Promethean self just as it is also anchored securely and inextricably to the ancient human body, and its imperfect past, present and future.
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