2: Avatars and Subjectivity

A second venture into the world of avatars.

My first experience had little guidance into how to create a body type. I decided to forgo any tutorials and just experiment. While my first reaction was to create an avatar the mirrors my physical form, the hypersexualized bodies were too sexy-video-game-creepy for me. False advertising. I’ve been to the gym three times this week. I do not look like that. Not even close. Which is part of the reason I go to the gym.

Body image and identity is a curious struggle. Since elementary school, I’ve been aware of the physical characteristics of the body I was given. I remember...

     seeing the one African girl in my Sunday School using a brown crayon, not Crayola “Peach,” to color in her coloring book.
     thinking my hair was getting darker, no longer blonde, because my family moved from California to Pennsylvania.
     knowing I was fat.

And then I moved to Asia. Where it’s not considered impolite to point out the obvious, to your face. “Miss M, why are you so fat?” You might think I’d tell that 4 year old his question was impolite, but it’s not in Korea. Grandmas yell at their granddaughters for gaining weight. Mothers, coming to discuss their child’s education, instead comment to the female teacher about her weight gain or loss. And parents offer plastic surgery as rewards for good grades.

     But I have light skin, big blue eyes, and an even bigger nose.

Just when I think my skin is as pasty and ugly as it can get, my vegetable lady gives me the most sincere compliment on how beautiful my skin is these days. And when I’ve been struggling with whether my bangs make my nose look huge and my face look especially fat from the side, one of the teachers at our early childhood center tells me she’d switch bodies with me. She’s a curvy Chinese of maybe 100 lbs, but she wants my eyes, my nose, and my skin.

Reading Christine L. Liao’s perspective on the gendered body and the meaning of the visual with avatars, I heard the Asian struggle, I felt my own struggle, and I remembered bypassing the human to become a panda in Second Life. Less creepy than a hypersexualized body? Maybe not. What weirdo walks around Second Life as a xiong mao?

I showed my panda, 美世, to some male coworkers in the staff lounge.

“I’m a panda.”

     “With a tight butt!”

Oh. Not what I was going for. Like Liao, I couldn’t leave the basic human anatomy. I struggled for the next hour to add layers of insulation, but cookies are much more effective than the sliders on Second Life. It's not a panda body; it's a panda costume on a human body. I can't achieve the Po belly that I desire. What message does my panda and her tight butt portray to others in the world? She shocked my coworkers. Is she me? She's my China-side masters-studying self. The part that is pushed uncomfortably into digital "realities" on a Sunday afternoon when I'd rather be drinking tea with a friend or walking along the Yellow Sea. I'd even take the treadmill at the gym over Second Life.
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At Voki, I went straight for the non-human avatars. I was nearly set on being a snowman when I found this large-eyed cartoon child, with a matching body type. I just played for a few minutes—could I find something that looked like me? Like my Mii at my neighbor’s house. A hairstyle with pronounced bangs. Tweak that hair to be a little more red, just like that box from Clairol did three weeks ago. Blue eyes, not green. And what clothes best fit me? The yellow striped hoodie didn’t seem like a lie. I do wear horizontal stripes. I bought lots of mustard clothes while shopping in the
states last month. And the red/blue/yellow just made me happy. Accessories? Suitcase. Yes, that is most fitting. And a background. After peeking through the uninspiring selection, I am uploading my own background. I’ve been uploading. For over an hour. I think this is a fail. Image too large, internet too slow. I was looking for something global, something local, my school, my house. I found one with me. Better Life & City with Art. Me and Me, in the same image. I liked the idea. But now I don’t like the orange uploading “Please Wait” words.

I walked to the vegetable stand, two grocery stores, and back, and still “Please Wait.” I think I broke it. The sweet lady at the vegetable stand told me that my face was thinner now. Before it was…and then she gestured to show a really puffy face. Not it is…and she gestured a longer, leaner face. She also complimented me about my hair. She’s so kind, in her absolutely-politically-incorrect-to-an-American way.

I guess I need to reload the page and try to recreate myself.

I’m an oddball. The “realistic” cartoon version of me is found under the “Oddball” category. What does that mean?


     

The restrictions make voki more user-friendly than Second Life, at least to a newbie. Lots of presets. It’s quick to use, but I can only make small tweaks. I can’t change the colors of my clothes. I can’t make my hair longer. I can’t hold a suitcase and a pencil. (Trust me, I always have a pencil when I travel. On average, each of my bags has four pens, two pencils, a permanent marker, and five bottlecaps.) And most frustratingly, even though I can upload a background, I can’t adjust the placement/resolution/stretching that is happening to my picture.

I used text-to-speech because I liked the mechanical sound to go with my avatar. This is a new set of limits. I experimented with every female English speaker to see if she could pronounce ni hao correctly. Karen from Australia has the closest pronunciation. Even when under the Chinese speakers, I have to type ni hao fo-net-ick-lee as knee how. And now that I’ve made a recording, what happened to my suitcase? Where do I file a claim for lost luggage?

That red frame around the player is garish. I wish I could go back and change that, without having to recreate everything. Limitations.
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The avatars are me, or representations of me. It's who I've chosen to present myself as. I make physical choices every day. Hair dye or natural? Bangs or clipped to the side? Straight or curly? Cardigans. Turtlenecks. And lots of scarves. The digital world removes some limitations of my physical body but adds others, either based on technical skills or social constraints (gendered, hypersexualized bodies of youthful adults, for one).

I had two friends in college who dressed extreme. They were God-loving evangelical Christians with afros, paperclips for earrings, Catholic school girl skirts one day and parachute pants the next. The clothes were absolutely extreme. At separate times, I asked each if they looked at their clothes like costumes. I didn't understand how they could vary so greatly from day to day. I have a much more consistent aesthetic. A limited view of me, slowly evolving, which now includes a panda. Like Plato's Theory of Forms, these are only imitations of my essence. Reflections of the real, limited either by human flesh or ones and zeros.


The avatars get their power from me. Apart from the roving eyes of my voki, following your mouse across this blog, they do not act on their own. They are both hollow in their lack of meaning in themselves and inability to function apart from me, yet amplified, in their projection of aspects of myself.

     The physical—auburn hair, blue eyes, light skin.
     The interests—color schemes, plays on words.
     The geography—a traveler finding meaning in China.

I can act through the avatar, assuming I want to spend time in that world, bound by that body. I can handle my physical limitations; I have dealt with them for 25 years. I am continually frustrated by digital limitations. Pandas that are not fat enough. That might have hair now. An odd brown bowl-cut. That can't load quickly enough in my current physical location. Not to mention my inability to "see" through the video game perspective. This mouselook is unfamiliar to me, a video-game/Second Life tourist.

Fantasy worlds do not attract me. Fantasy bodies are not alluring. The diversity is fake. As Liao and others note, the virtual world might release one from the physical world of gender, ethnicity, and species, but it lacks a diversity of the non-beautiful.

The aged.
     The young.
          The differently-abled.

They are part of the kaleidoscope, part of the array of beauty on the earth. Virtual worlds' ability to transcend such perceived limitations only continues to devalue those characteristics in society. While opening ourselves up to a new range of body, be it wings, cat ears, or purple skin, we now removed the less-than-ideal. A plastic surgery car wash. And we have replaced those distinctions with new ones. Liao writes of the hierarchy of the physical in Second Life. "Prim hair" is desired. People are willing to help you adhere to society's standards of perfection.

Just a new system of constraints, not a release from constraints.

It's part of being human—the need to classify, to organize, to evaluate the world. But we do it to each other. Virtual worlds might alter the limitations, but they do not alter human nature.
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I narrowed my hips, plumped my belly, and found ways to change my breast size, buoyancy, and cleavage. Pandas with buoyant cleavage. Ugg. And it seems the bowl cut hair is just visible when I'm editing my appearance.

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How do you encourage diversity in an alternate reality? Force people to be differently-abled? To be old? To be young? To be fat? To be short? To be counter-culture? Like Liao, that could be the objective. To defy acceptable looks.

At a high school level, this might be a visual culture exploration of advertising, Photoshop, the Dove campaign for real beauty, celebrities that have dared to photograph without alteration, and pop culture remixes of the photoshopped. Making a spoof advertisement: Maybe it's Maybelline, maybe it's Photoshop! It could be helpful to compare beauty magazines aimed at different ethnicities. After looking at what is privileged and what is desired within each subgroup, and even the domain of Second Life, one could create a counter-cultural avatar. The antithesis of the desired. At an elementary level, it might be a role-play self-portrait, imagining oneself at a different age or living in a different country, with different genetic features. This could involve researching commonalities among elementary kids around the world---What does school look like to them? What is their home like? What clothes are necessary? What clothes are cool? How do they wear their hair?---and creating an avatar to fulfill this projection of themselves in another culture.


Assignment: Create a speaking avatar at voki. Discuss the limits of representation in the voki application and describe your imagination of a human identity outside those limits. Next, download Second Life®, install, join with a unique name, and the selection of an avatar from SL's limited human representation. Next go to "appearance" and change the avatar's appearance to a representation of an empowered persona. Discuss what is an avatar, in what ways is socio-political agency performed in the avatar you created, what are the landmarks that you use to locate yourself as teacher, what are the limits of representation in the virtual world avatar application, and how might an art lesson that involves creating avatars become a critical avatar pedagogy to encourage/ensure virtual diversity, multivocality, diverse and multiple perspectives?

References:
Liao, C. (2008). My metamorphic avatar journey. Visual Culture & Gender, 3, 30-39.
Knobel, M., & Lanshear, C. (2008). Remix: The art of craft of endless hybridization. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(1), 22–33.