The Faces behind the Avatars

The avatar is our most personal representation in the digital world of Secondlife. Due to the highly customisable nature of the avatar, it becomes in many ways our virtual selves, embodying the way we want to be seen by those we encounter. After all, our own bodies we are born with, and can only be altered through concerted effort over time, or extreme surgeries. But our avatar is how we choose to look, with our form, skin and clothes being changeable with a couple of clicks. It becomes the person we either wish we were, or feel that we would like to explore living as. We can become our fantasy self, sexy and stylish, muscled and powerful, exotic and wild... Or we can build our virtual self to be true to our real forms, or at least a stylised version of ourselves, to allow us the feeling of our real selves living in this magical, impossible world, flying, fighting and exploring strange things we could never find in the real world.

It is this relationship between the avatar and the creator that is explored in a project entitled "Alter Ego: Avatars and their creators", an exhibit being shown in SL (Click Here for SLURL), and also being reproduced as a book in the real world. In the exhibition, various pictures are on display. These pictures either show a snapshot of an avatar in SL, or a photo of a user. When you click on the picture it switches to the alter-ego of that person. As you stare at the avatar picture, you try to imagine what kind of person lies behind it, and when you switch the picture to the photo, there is almost always a surprise. The pink-clad psycho cheerleader becomes a twenty something male. The be-suited black man becomes a hip-hop white man. The Star Wars bounty hunter becomes a young boy suffering from poliomyelitis. The reasons behind the choices these people have made go unspoken, but pictures speak a thousand words, and after looking through the exhibition, you may never look at another avatar the same way again.