AVATAR, Myself Other

When I first joined Second Life in 2008, the first thing that captivated me in this collaborative virtual environment was the ability to customize my avatar. For a long time my life in Metaverse was nothing less than to playing dolls again, as when I was a child. But this time I was the doll myself! My doll was for dressing and undressing, hairstyling, but it was also my way of communicating with others. It did not take long for her to create her own personality, a projection of mine, but not exactly the same ... From that moment on my avatar became stable for long periods of time.

First a "grunge" girl with a giant straight hair. It was like this for a long and quite lonely time… Then a large curly hair and more usual clothes, an avatar far more within the "norm" marked the beginning of a social life in Second Life. During that time I made friends, attended parties and social events. As time went on and I became more and more interested in taking virtual photographs, this "norm" became frustrating. That was when I “cuted” my hair. This shorter, fuzzy hair I still wear now.

The big revolution in the way I see my avatar happened when I met alpha.tribe avatars, which inspired me to totally rethink the way I embody my avatar. It was somehow, at this point, that my avatar was dehumanized, without completely abandoning the metaphor of the human. My virtual body expanded in the new expressive potentialities opened by the creations of Alpha Auer. I quickly began to build my own avatars and later to create and distribute avatars built together with Meilo Minotaur.

Finally, in the Master Programme of Art and Multimedia Design of the School of Education of the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, an opportunity arose to work in Collaborative Virtual Environments (in this case, Second Life) in an educational context. At that point I felt the need to create an avatar physically similar to me. This avatar was almost only used in academic situations so far.

In this work I show two possibilities of thinking the avatar: one as the virtualization of myself, the avatar represents me, it takes my place in the virtual environment; the other in which the avatar becomes virtual expressive potency that extends beyond myself creating a hybrid between who I am and who I become, not outside of me, but beyond me.

This was a solo exhibition at CRU Galeria of Virtual Photography and an Art Book.