Metaverse Creativity (new title: Virtual Creativity) - Current Issue

This article examines methods of self-recognition, reflection and presentation across virtual and physical spaces in New York City-based multimedia artist Carla Gannis’s work. Considering the influential role of the mirror over the centuries and drawing on various theories about visual perception, a case is made for the ability to construct new and perform unique facets of individual identity by alternating between virtual (intangible) and material (physical) environments by way of technological mediation. Gannis’s amplified compositions of self-portraiture serve as quintessential embodiments of such identity-bending constructions.

Under the theme of transformation through physical and non-physical travel, this article explores known and unknown worlds, and real, imagined, and virtual spaces, through collaborative art and performative writing practices. The weaving of real stories and aspirations, and the notion of the journey that extends beyond or breaks through cultural boundaries and stories of personal transformation are themes that are explored in particular. The article further explores virtual worlds as spaces of and for the imagination, where the entanglement of the physical with the virtual is exploited for its creative potential. In particular, there are opportunities to further explore our understanding of the transforming act of virtual and imagined travel through an exploration of the experience of time, space and place.

This article references the ‘pictorial’ and ‘affective’ turns in theory in order to discern ‘what avatars want’, a play on the cultural theorist W. J. T. Mitchell’s ideas. By arguing that what avatars want is really what we want, I propose that ‘truth’ or ‘real’ has very little to do with how we feel about our avatar creations. So putting aside whether we want to suggest that an avatar is ‘alive’, their existence reveals our desires, yearnings, fears and insecurities. I concentrate on the intricacies of reading the avatar as an animated, performed image and our desire to inject it with subjectivity, while at the same time thinking of it as an object. The avatar entity need not be proven ‘real’ or ‘alive’ for us to feel it is. We have a ‘reality hunger’, as suggested by the writer David Shields, which needs to be fed with objects that seem sentient and brimming with emotions.

The article builds on the assumption that art in outer space and art in virtual worlds share certain similarities. They should be sought in the issues of space and specific status of the body and embodiment in space. This includes not only the change of perspective, coming from the body’s liberation from gravity, but also the inherent abstractness and inaccessibility of these spaces for our immediate experience that can result in the absence of the body or in its substitution by various technological prostheses, extensions and avatars. These issues are addressed by employing the notions from the phenomenological thought of Merleau-Ponty (his understanding of the embeddedness of the body into the situation, the relational space, the notion of body schema).

The article discusses two projects of avatar-based performance art within Second Life that refer to the body in the environment of zero gravity (ZeroG SkyDancers by DanCoyote and Come to Heaven by Gazira Babeli), as well as an example of postgravity art (50-year theatre performance Noordung:: 1995–2045 by Dragan Živadinov whose final goal is to abolish art-as-we-know-it and transfer it into outer space [cosmos] where it will begin to lead a new, free and independent life-as-wedo-not-know-it-yet).