Avatars as identities in the jungle - Thank you for purchasing Avatars!

It is not a question of leaving the body behind but rather of extending embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis. —N. Katherine Hayles

“It is hard to believe that only three years later, in the spring of 1995, Worlds Chat, the very first three dimensional virtual world appeared on the Internet, complete with avatars moving around in a simulated space station and talking. With Worlds Chat and the other virtual worlds you don't need goggles.. the world appears inside a window on your computer. Since Worlds Chat, there has been an explosion of virtual worlds on the Internet with hundreds of thousands of people discovering what it is like to be an avatar in Cyberspace. Stephenson's huge Metaverse virtual world with its millions of inhabitants jacking in with goggles is not here yet, but you can experience something like it on your computer today.”

In the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, an avatar is “the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form”. Neal Stephenson's (1992) science fiction novel Snow Crash popularized the usage of the term avatar to refer to online virtual bodies. An avatar becomes the identity, thus, the virtual body, of an individual who enters a virtual environment, like through a web gaming environment or another quite virtual world. Subsequently, the individual uses a virtual techno-body as their interface for technology-mediated communication.

Bruce Damer's comprehensive work "Avatars" still remains one of the most important and extensive works of the field, despite the passing of years. This 3000-page mega-book is an excellent historical resource on subjects such as avatars, digital world making and net-art. This book is written by someone who has experienced many things on the World Wide Web since the early days of cyberspace (virtual weddings and parties, build a three dimensional town with 60 other people, gone skiing with avatar friends, and much, much more). It is a book in which he shared his various experiences and left a magnificent historical corpus. In his own words, he is DigiGardener.

Worlds Chat was one of the first virtual worlds launched on the Internet, back in the spring of 1995. Worlds Chat has given us a great waystation, or stopover point, on the way into the digital solar system.

With Worlds Chat, you may explore a three-dimensional virtual world full with individuals dressed in digital costumes known as avatars. The Internet is becoming a genuine place to visit, a place where people live. People are communicating and forming new forms of communities based on their shared interests and values rather than the locations in which they dwell.

The Palace is a large constellation of small virtual worldlets that spans in the chat cosmos. If you are a registered user, you may design your own avatar, gather props, play group games, program entertaining behaviors with scripts, and even construct your own Palace worldlet in The Palace. Above all, there is a lot of chat at The Palace. The Palace is teeming with people eager to converse.

Voyager is your entryway to many fascinating universes of sound and voice. Recollect Citizens Band (CB) radio, or maybe you are a HAM radio administrator? Computerized Space Traveler carries that experience to the new symbol Cyberspace. In a Traveler world like Utopia or MTV Tikkiland, you pick a symbol (which seems to be a goliath head, or an outfit party cover), fly around in three aspects, and when you see other talking heads or hear their voices, you can participate in the discussion. Since the sound is likewise three layered you can see when somebody is talking from your left or right side or when a discussion is directly before you or somewhere out there. You will feel like you have truly chatted with your companions in Traveler. A way you take a gander at it, Traveler is phenomenal excursion through sound.

These sites are just some of the earliest examples of cyberspace at the beginning of avatar history.

“we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.” says Deleuze & Guattari

so the question should be asked:

What Can an Avatar Do?

an avatar operates as the site through which human agency is anticipated and reflected back to the users, affecting that user’s sense of experience and identity. Through avatars, users experience both the reification and disruption of limits between the "real" and "virtual" universes, between the psyche and body and between the natural and emblematic.

Avatars as an digital identities and self that are created through technology are the gates between the real and virtual but it annihilates that duality. With the avatars, there is no distinction between the real and virtual world. It functions as abstract line in Deleuzian sense. an abstract line is a line with no outlines, a line that passes between things, a line in mutation. It is very much alive, living and creative. An assemblage is carried along by its abstract lines, when it is able to have or trace abstract lines.

The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible. The source of themes, materials, actions, and the relationships between them are to be derived from any place or period except from the arts, their derivatives, and their milieu.

The first promotional video of the first virtual world and avatars. Circa 1986.