http://www.dance-tech.net/forum/topics/respecting-accepting-avatar

I am suggesting that our perception of ‘avatar’ in today`s technopraxis envisions a certain embodiment of corporeality in their other-worldly makeup. Avatar is becoming-in-the-world more than just a visual construct, more than just an enabled voice or an intent, more than just a chimera - a diversion from the real witnessed in the real. Avatar is all of these things but also post-human. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway asserts that, ‘… the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other …’ are now dominating our lives . The ‘other’ here, is telepresence itself comprised of miniaturized componentry, its forum for communication the ether - pure quintessence, as Haraway puts it. The avatars which populate Second Life are extensions of ourselves - post-body wishes. “If wishes were fishes we would all cast nets” (Herbert, F. Dune) Well, the nets are rich with avatar inscriptions of the real for many users in MUVE spaces and perhaps also (unwittingly) outside these spaces and within the context of this post title, their descriptions of characterisation which exist vicariously for the user require no confirmation that what exists is anything other than a prosthesis made to order which has the power to not exist, but actively and immersively live.

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