Intimate Pervy Avatars

Abstract

Bodies never touch. Look at Second Life, that ‘free 3D virtual world where users can socialize, connect and create using free voice and text chat’ (Second Life website, 2011). Look at Alan Dojoji or Julu Twine, never touching, but sometimes engaged in a stylized and disordered dance or combat with other avatar toons¹ such as Sandy Taifun. If you were logged into Second Life and looking at the scene through your own avatar eyes, you would read the avatar movements as odd, nothing like human motion. Alan Dojoji is probably in a particulate haze emitted from the avatar surface; somewhere in there is the toon body, ascetic and Sadhu-like. The avatars move at their own speed following a Virilian logistics of perception, but their movement is intensely personal and utterly subjective. Second Life artist Alan Sondheim (a.k.a. Alan Dojoji) calls it ‘inconceivable’. You can mobilize a story around the avatars. You can cluster the signs and read a narrative. The avatars quarrel and fight; they dance a pas de deux; they engage in a ritual mating dance; they are socializing and connecting.