Figures 19-24: Manifesto for Avatars 7 (Little, 1999)
7 “To combine visual codes, signifying signs, and social images into avatars that take a combative stance toward the forces of capital:
1. Seek, rarify, and valorize disintegration and instability
2. Resist unified identity relative to race, gender, age, human, animal, or machine.
3. Refuse participation in wholeness and actively dismantle myths of transcendentalism.
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In the physical world, the avatar is nothing but a concept, a conceptual image of the self that becomes a visual representation in Virtual Reality. In is only in cyberspace that it transforms into a fixed representation that enables the agent to exist in the given environment. As an idea, the avatar is the place of freedom of the material body, a place of suspension of identity, traits and habits, a place of pure desire. But as the avatar comes to be visualised, then it evolves into something more than pure immanence. Even as a mere piece of software the avatar becomes a set picture. Here all the oppositions that the avatar stands for come together into an image so that it brings together at once the corporeal and the immanent, the body and the mind, the represented and the
representer, and as Little laments, “the self and the commodity” (Little, 1999). Then the avatar is no longer the body without organs, the unconsumable body, but instead a hybrid system, a “strap-on persona” (Little, 1999) to the body to represent the
individual’s presence to the specific space – reinforcing the idea that “we all cyborgs”.
“The avatar, under the semblance of a representation of one, democratic individual free to construct his or her “own” mythic fantasy or satiation of personal desire, is actually returned to its original function as a top-down tool, the embodiment of post-modern multi-national commerce.” (Little, 1999)
Gregory Little’s project “Manifesto for Avatars” aims at seeing the avatar as a site of resistance and as a symbol for the unconsumable body, the body without organs.
Going back to the cyborg’s partiality and incompleteness, Little suggests escaping the framework of any biological, cultural, economic, or religious discourse. His avatars (fig.19-24) reject biological connections, detach from all real life traits and behaviours and favour fragmentation, suspension and hybridity. Like contemporary monsters, they
4. Create tensions and conflicts through the simultaneous presentation of the desiring subject and the fetishized object of desire.
5. Draw from narratives of abjection, the alien, and the other
6. Pierce the skin, do the taboo, show the insides, destroy the internal/external binary.
7. Refuse the temptation to succumb to the slick, seamless special effects of emergent technology
8. Avoid personal or social fantasy, step out of bounds, lose your boundaries altogether
9. Avoid mystery, make analysis of the unconscious impossible, be hyper literal 10. Use images that speak of hyperembodiment, of extremes of physicality, like the visceral, the abject, the defiled, and the horrific” (Little, 1999)
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stand against completion, singularity and unity, celebrating difference, open-endedness and free desire. Similar to the carnival body described above, these figures of
exaggeration and excessiveness are far from the complete and cleansed ideals, opposing not only to classic aesthetics, but also to the processes of production and accumulation.
Little’s avatars differentiate from the generic representations that flood cyberspace.
They are repulsive and ugly comparing to the “perfection” of conventional avatars.
Body parts are blended with other objects, organs are multiplied and exaggerated in growth, while others are completely absent, rejecting any established proportionality or symmetry of the human body. By playing with races, genders and age, experimenting visual codes and social images, and combining animal, human and mechanic
characteristics, they explore the “digital grotesque” and visualise a body without organs.
Figures 25-8: Allegories: Pasiphae, the Architect, the Inkmistress, the Philosopher (Greenaway, 1998)
In a different project, Peter Greenaway creates his own hybrid figures to represent visions of the world. 100 allegories to represent the world (1998) is a work that Greenaway developed as a visitor at the University of Humanities in Strasbourg in 1995. For this project over one hundred and fifty citizens of Strasbourg volunteered to pose nude for him. Greenaway worked with mixed collaging techniques on those images, computer processing, painting and graphic work, to “dress” his figures (fig. 25-8). “The ‘clothing’ was subjective and wide-ranging in its eclecticism, building up layers of allegorical referencing, which, on the one hand, fulfilled the function of allegory as a mode of public communication and, on the other, investigated all manner of private meanings which can be seen to be most germane and essential to making the image arresting, instructive, entertaining and contemporary” (Greenaway, 1998, p.5).
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The body here becomes a field of investigation where different materials, patterns and techniques meet. It becomes one with its “clothing” and always in interaction with its world displayed on the background in order to describe a specific “allegory”. The one hundred figures produced draw their references from the historical and the
contemporary realm, from the artist’s past work on cinema and painting, and from the history of body-imaging. Greenaway, himself a Second Life player and an artist who likes to experiment with the construction of the body (an incident from Second Life that involves him is described in the following chapter), creates his unique “avatar project”:
based on the participation of a local community, he creates avatars/representations of the world that attempt to stand between the classic conception of the cosmos and the contemporary world. Through these 100 “allegories” Greenaway aims at portraying the world. He revisits ancient archetypes and gives them new life. The rich man and the poor man, the king and the queen, the beggar and the thief, the clown and the
philosopher, meet the Muses, the Fates, the Past, the Present and the Future, and gods and heroes such as Mars, Pluto, Jupiter, Hercules and Prometheus. And at the same time in these archetype figures one may recognise contemporary pop-idols and television stars, the homeless and the wealthy, the politician, the intellectual, the worker and the student. Each figure is presented within a specific context to indicate the character’s place in the world. Greenaway plays with bestiality and hybridity, sexual fantasies and myths to present the truth about the body in the world through the ages (fig.29).
Figure 29: The Minotaur8 (Greenaway, 1998)
8 In the 78th allegory, under the category “hybrids” we may find The Minotaur, a half-human and half-animal creature, “the bull-man, a traditional allegory of
108 3.8 “In the Belly of the Monster”
The depiction of the body has never been merely a composition of an image, but it carries with it a series of meanings and connections. Two or three-dimensional, in painting or in cinema or in Virtual Reality, moving or static, the body has always been the place where the material world meets the conceptual world and “virtual realities”, where physicality meets ideas, fears, hopes and desires. Virtual Reality is probably an appropriate environment for the visualisation of these relations, as bodies and
environment are user-created, three-dimensional and interactive in real time, yet immaterial and disembodied. But going back to the question at the beginning of this chapter, what does the construction of the avatar signify here? Does this out-of-body experimentation illustrate the need to return to the physical body and restructure its conceptualisation, or oppositely, the demand to liberate from it and live through disembodied existences? What do the monsters of the digital age have to say about the human body? In her essay, The Actors Are Cyborg, Nature Is Coyote and the
Geography Is Elsewhere: Postscript to “Cyborgs at Large” (1991b), Donna Haraway calls simians, cyborgs and women monsters, as boundary creatures that always had a destabilizing place in the evolution of the contemporary culture. Haraway’s monsters
“demonstrate” and “signify” possible worlds and constitute signs for worlds “for which
‘we’ are responsible” (Haraway, 1991b, p.22). The worlds that Haraway suggests are built by deconstructing others, by decomposing established beliefs and ideas, and by fragmenting selves into multiplicities. They bring together existing entities and fantastic visions. Within this framework Virtual Reality reinforces the idea that embodiment is not about a fixed location or a static body, but about critical positioning and relativity.
Haraway argues that “the best place to locate this work remains ‘in the belly of the monster’, that is in the fictional and technical constructions of the late twentieth-century
monstrosity, a warning symbol of the likely outcome of bestiality” (Greenaway, 1998, p.265). Although traditional iconography represents the Minotaur with a bull’s head and a man’s body, this is here reversed. The carnivore mythological creature is here represented by a smiling, teasing young man with hairy legs that holds the horns to his head in order to persuade us of his monstrosity. This beast can hardly be seen as evil or threatening, giving a second chance to people to love him. The Minotaur’s world is composed of a series of contradictory elements: “exotic background to make the Cretan fantasy feel at home” (Greenaway, 1998, p.78 – The Minotaur). The Cretan labyrinth, the home of the Minotaur is combined with an Egyptian landscape, while a slaughtered bull at the centre of the maze connects this allegory to the allegory of Europe and that of Pasiphae, the Minotaur’s mother.
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cyborgs, site of the potent fusion of the technical, textual, organic, mythic, and political” (Haraway, 1991b, p.24). It is in the belly of the monster that we can rethink the body’s place in the world in terms of materiality and virtuality.
After addressing the body as a technological object, this chapter has examined how one of its controversial extensions, the avatar, as the monster of the digital age,
disembodied and embodying at the same time, becomes a medium to discard obsolete ideas, to deconstruct and reconstruct worlds, and reposition selves. It has attempted to re-code the human body and its connections to the world by looking into its multiple manifestations and appearances. At this point and extending this line of study, it is important to question how this newly conceptualised body connects to other bodies as well, and forms communities and crowds in the electronic age.
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