I was very interested in what Alex mentioned about the word avatar coming from the Hindu avatara. On Wikipedia an avatara in Hindu philosophy is described as the ‘descent’ or incarnation of a divine being or the Supreme Being, onto Earth (Vishnu). It usually implies a descent into lower realms of existence for special purposes. An avatara is an embodiment, a bodily manifestation of the divine.
Vishnu as a Fish
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar
Translating that to the virtual world, Wikipedia says that an avatar is a computer user’s representation of himself or herself, whether in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games, a two-dimensional icon or picture used on internet forums and other communities. It is an ‘object’ representing the embodiment of the user.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(virtual_reality)
In Second Life when a user creates an avatar, they become God-like. Is this one of the appeals of Second Life, this power of re-creation? Should we all have a special purpose in our Second Life? Do we understand ourselves more or less through avatars?
Simon Penny in his article, The Virtualization of Art Practice: Body Knowledge and the Engineering Worldview, writes, “The roboticist Hans Moravec has envisioned a future in which we upload our consciousnesses into galactic gas cloud digital databanks and live as immortal disembodied digital entities. But he neglects to observe just how similar this idea is to ‘going to heaven’ ” (Penny 31). He talks about body-knowledge in terms of simulation, “The downside of this process is that it includes a bodily monoculture; it destroys cognitive diversity, the complex ecology of body-knowledge… we may be killing off diverse body-knowledge before we know what they are good for” (Penny 35).
My avatar is a fox like creature wearing a tight pink suit. ????
Lilka Szczepanski at Animal Island
In terms of documentary, I think that the ability to take photographs of your experiences in Second Life is interesting, you are taking digital documents of a digital space? There are also many spaces within Second Life to display different types of media, and view these displays.
How does the context and content of documentary change in Second Life, the virtual world?
