The Contentions of Digital Tenancy
This essay was made December 5, 2023. I made it into a zine. If you'd like a physical copy, send me an email. It needs to be edited.
Where Does My Avatar Live? The Contentions of Digital Tenancy
“For millennia, we have been compulsively figuring animals, people, and gods in search of some confirmation that we are whole, intact, and belong to something larger than ourselves. I know that such confirmation can never be vouchsafed by my own limited body; I must seek it elsewhere: in the face of the other, in representations, in simulacra The seductions of media begin here.” - Caroline A. Jones, “Going Beyond The Body”, Synthetic Times Media Art China 2008
Avatars: Creation and Control
When a body is created digitally, who owns its assets? The phenomenologically passive nature of a virtual 3D object elicits a conversation of who is in control, who is being controlled, and who gets to make decisions about these bodies? It is important to understand how interactions between synthetic and organic bodies elicit conversations of power and agency, and how we can navigate a future to transcend the barriers put in place by inequitable dominant societal structures. Who gets to control these assets, and how do we protect the agency of whoever's identity this is?
As a mode of expression in networked spaces, the avatar inserted a fundamental shift in the verifiability of an image that defines its own contextual validity. It created a new prosthetic "presencing" in the way we understand our place in the world, and how we interact through our identities. Just like the introduction of photograph, we again come to the apex of the human desire to capture our identities and essence in a modality that extends beyond the body. But, if the body is a reflection of our identity, and our identity is a vessel that inherits control, how can we maintain our autonomy and agency over our bodies within constraints in the age of Corporate Corporeal Commodity? As an artist that masquerades as an avatar, I am both myself and Avatar Lilith. Contending with this dichotomy will define how we both relate to each other in our current technocratic landscape.
To construct an avatar, a developer can either create a mesh from scratch, or use pieces of existing models to then mold and sculpt into their ideal form. The idea of molding an existing mesh to then create likeness or identifying features feels almost “Frankensteinian” in the sense that the developer has to alter the coordinate points of the facial features but maintain the same topology of the original face underneath it. There is a constant idea that the original face must have had some sort of history; who built it and who is it originally modeled after? There must have been some type of reference used for the original mesh that then generates a vague idea of “defaultness” for each subsequent iteration of 3d modelers using it for their own avatars.
On Defaultness
Each 3D software has some type of “default” character that is then usually used as a base mesh for a custom character to be modeled on top of. This is just one of many different particular pipelines, and one that I was initially reluctant to commit to in my creation process. The process of building an avatar is one of birth, modification, revision, and reflection, especially if the likeness of an avatar has particular ties to an existing human being. It’s a very intimate process as a modeler to have to examine each pore, each wrinkle, the width of the nose, the length of the neck, to be able to breathe life and likeness into the 3D object. It is a particular gaze - almost a loving caressing gaze - that occurs in this process when attuning to these details the avatar begins to reflect back onto the artist one’s own mortality. Simultaneously, there is a two-fold directional power exchange - the reflection of mortality and the disappearing of persona or anima behind the avatar. It’s something similar that happens in the operating room - eventually the object of attention begins to lose its own meaning - a sort of semantic satiation; a clinical and circumstantial objectification. The question is what happens when this is multiplied on a larger scale with everyone experiencing their own virtual semantic satiation?
As I endlessly scroll through Tik Tok late at night an unease settles in as I gaze upon the thousands of faces emoting and expositing - I momentarily lose the sense that these people behind the screen are flesh. There is a slight possibility existing at the same time - that these faces are artificial, mediated through a patented LCD screen existing in the palm of my hand that rests on my pillow. After having scrolled through thousands of marketplace avatar faces on Unreal Engine’s Metahuman platform, Sketchfabs marketplace, and DAZ studios character creation software, I realize I subconsciously can’t tell the difference between the emotional recognition of a flesh based representation of a “real” human or a CGI avatar. It is the semantic satiation that occurs when the medium becomes the reified act - a photograph is not photo real because it looks like “reality,” it’s real because it looks like a photograph. Realistic avatars and AI companions rest comfortably within the 19:5:9 aspect ratio of our devices just like our TikTok influencers. Without the tethering to flesh space, we won’t be able to separate our parasocial relationships and connections from the simulated or the simulacrum.
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This presents a material problem when the creation of these avatars is unexamined in the ways that it replicates biases and defaultness in the mechanics of production. Unreal Engine’s metahumans have a visible Digital Provenance - we can see that the eye shape is replicated from one avatar to another, permeated exponentially in gamers’ projects into infinity. The question is, whose eyes were the original? Where did these freckles come from? Why does Ada look like a synthesis of both Ameila and Aoi? While the Digital Seams of the avatars do present themselves for example in the eyelashes and hair rendering (we can vaguely tell it’s not real in the right lighting), our fusiform gyrus (the part that is meant for human facial recognition) is still activated. Think of the idea of Paredoila - seeing faces in nonhuman objects.
The Digital Seams
Every medium has its limitations in that the material seams eventually present itself to make the said medium aware of its own construction. The literal seams on a shirt that start to unravel over time, the paint chipping away on an old masterpiece, the experience of a RPG character intersecting into a boulder, or a head propelling into the 4th dimension.
