Full of contradictions, the historic legacy of self-image, the avatar - a new self? - takes its power from these contradictions to potentially represent an unbounded self: the new avatar-Prometheus unbound.

All that remains are questions for and of the future: how much latitude will we give our projected selves when our avatars take on autonomous aspects, as they are bound to do, or are already perhaps doing; will we give them one day off a week to haunt the wires and datastreams of cyberspace in their own time? Will we rent our disembodied selves to the hypercorporations of the teleconnected global network - will it be a telesensorial common or tollway?

Who is responsible when one avatar infringes the rights of others (avatars or "actual" people), causes damage, entraps or steals the property of others? Who polices the avatars of the future as the avatar communities inevitably grow and develop, who writes the rules, who pulls the stings, who makes the money? Surely not some United Nation of Sysops, the new global police of self-representation? Perhaps we won't have a choice, or the money, or the inclination, to care?

By way of example, Sony's everquest.com, a 3D VisMOO, possibly the most complex visualisation of new worlds underway today, has hundreds of thousands of users, that is to say subscribers. Its increasingly immersive and complex alternative universe of personalised identities in personalised and consensual realms draws an ever wider range of "players". Will you, your family or friends be one soon? Everquest plans to shortly introduce "real" avatars with a finite lifespan. When you die, you die, in the new Everquest - by choice, of course. Personally I wonder if, and hope, there is an afterlife - at least in Everquest.

Will the new perspective of a digital subjectivity propel us into escape velocity, too far and too fast to escape being burned? Or will the technopticon's all seeing eye and ubiquitous presence simply assimilate our "essence", our digital profile, and synthesise an improved, virtual and state-approved doppelganger, casting off the husk of our older decrepit fleshbody? What kind of "date" is one with a virtual Kyoko Date or Lara Croft, with the digitally created cyber personality avatars of the theme suburbs of the disneyfied future?

What rules will we represent ourselves by and have others represent themselves by in a time of disguises and masks, a time some cynics think has already arrived? And how can we hope to meaningfully maintain control - a “micro-me” copyright - over our Selves in a ceaselessly fluid digital representation of those selves, our world and our imaginations?

What if a time comes when we cannot choose the identities we want but are instead forced to have ones not of our own choosing? (a bit like our current lot some may say!). Would a "court world" populated by legalistic avatars do battle on an aethereal plane for the right to be what we want to be, or perhaps to be what we are not? And is this a new body, self or way of being that is more or less visible, more or less real, and more or less than human?

This special digital subject - the avatar - mimics in techno-cultural play the powers of the ancient gods. Unlike the god-hosts pulling the strings behind their representative puppets however, we as remote earthly hosts cannot yet see where our networked godlike dreamings and ghostly representations may lead us. And so is the avatar a proper object of study in the age of digital replication.

Our experience of this world begins and ends with the body; but as with Wiener's Golem, maybe we can learn, and change and, after all, the future is uncertain.

I leave you with one final model and the idea that representation is a dialogue between, not only the host and the Other that the avatar mediates between, but also between the host and its avatar. Like Deleuze and Guattari's rhizonomic paradigm, the wasp and the orchid, each forming the other in mutual presupposition, locked in a dance or orchestration of reality it-self with them-selves; so is the avatar shaped around and about our own selves; and it, in turn, could be said to shape what we are, and what we are yet to become.

The question is now, of this newer, interconnected and interdependent rhizome, the host and avatar; which is the wasp and which the orchid?

A paper presented at futureScreen 99,
AvAtars | Phantom Agents: Identities and role play in web worlds,
For dLux Media Arts, 6th November 1999, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney,
Jeffrey J Cook, 6.11.99