Where Does My Avatar Live? The Contentions of Digital Tenancy
“For millennia, we have been compulsively figuring animals, people, and gods in search of some confirmation that we are whole, intact, and belong to something larger than ourselves. I know that such confirmation can never be vouchsafed by my own limited body; I must seek it elsewhere: in the face of the other, in representations, in simulacra The seductions of media begin here.” — Caroline A. Jones, “Going Beyond The Body”, Synthetic Times Media Art China 2008
Avatars: Creation and Control
When a body is created digitally, who owns its assets? Who is in control within hierarchies of technocracies? The phenomenologically passive nature of a virtual 3D object elicits a conversation of who is in control, who is being controlled, and who gets to make decisions about these bodies? It is important to understand how meaningful interactions between bodies elicit conversations of power and agency, and how we can navigate a future to transcend the barriers put in place by dominant societal structures. Who gets to control these bodies, and how do we protect the agency of whoever’s body this is?
As a mode of expression in networked spaces, the avatar inserted a fundamental shift in the veritability of the medium that defines its own contextual validity. It created an additional modal shift in the way we understand our place in the world, and how we interact through our identities. Just like the photograph, we again come to the apex of the human desire to capture our identities and essence in a modality that extends beyond the body. If the body is a reflection of our identity, and our identity is a vessel that inherits control, how can we maintain our autonomy and agency over our bodies within constraints in the age of corporate corporeal commodity? As an artist that masquerades as an avatar sometimes, I am both myself (Adrienne) and Avatar Lilith, contending with this dichotomy and seeking to define how we both relate to each other.
To construct an avatar, a developer can either create a mesh from scratch, or use pieces of existing models to then mold and sculpt into their ideal form. The idea of molding an existing mesh to then create likeness or identifying features feels almost “Frankensteinian” in the sense that the developer has to alter the coordinate points of the facial features but maintain the same topology of the original face underneath it. There is a constant idea that the original face must have had some sort of history; who built it and who is it originally modeled after? There must have been some type of reference used for the original mesh that then generates a vague idea of “defaultness” for each subsequent iteration of 3d modelers using it for their own avatars.
On Defaultness
Each 3D software has some type of “default” character that is then usually used as a base mesh for a custom character to be modeled on top of. This is just one of many different particular pipelines, and one that I was initially reluctant to commit to in my creation process. The process of building an avatar is one of birth, modification, revision, and reflection, especially if the likeness of an avatar has particular ties to an existing human being. It’s a very intimate process as a modeler to have to examine each pore, each wrinkle, the width of the nose, the length of the neck, to be able to breathe life and likeness into the 3D object. It is a particular gaze — almost a loving caressing gaze — that occurs in this process when attuning to these details the avatar begins to reflect back onto the artist one’s own mortality. Simultaneously, there is a two-fold directional power exchange — the reflection of mortality and the disappearing of persona or anima behind the avatar. It’s something similar that happens in the operating room — eventually the object of attention begins to lose its own meaning — a sort of semantic satiation; a clinical and circumstantial objectification. The question is what happens when this is multiplied on a larger scale with everyone experiencing their own virtual semantic satiation?
As I endlessly scroll through Tik Tok late at night an unease settles in as I gaze upon the thousands of faces emoting and expositing — I momentarily lose the sense that these people behind the screen are flesh. There is an almost-possibility existing at the same time — that these faces are artificial, mediated through a patented LCD screen existing in the palm of my hand that rests on my pillow. After having scrolled through thousands of marketplace avatar faces on Unreal Engine’s Metahuman platform, Sketchfabs marketplace, and DAZ studios character creation software, I realize I subconsciously can’t tell the difference between the emotional recognition of a flesh based representation of a “real” human or a CGI avatar. It is the semantic satiation that occurs when the medium becomes the reified act — a photograph is not photo real because it looks like “reality,” it’s real because it looks like a photograph. Realistic avatars and AI companions rest comfortably within the 19:5:9 aspect ratio of our devices just like our TikTok influencers. Without the tethering to flesh space, we won’t be able to separate our parasocial relationships and connections from the simulated or the simulacrum.
This presents a material problem when the creation of these avatars is unexamined in the ways that it replicates biases and defaultness in the mechanics of production. Unreal Engine’s metahumans have a visible Digital Provenance — we can see that the eye shape is replicated from one avatar to another, permeated exponentially in gamers’ projects into infinity. The question is, whose eyes were the original? Where did these freckles come from? Why does Ada look like a synthesis of both Ameila and Aoi? While the Digital Seams of the avatars do present themselves for example in the eyelashes and hair rendering (we can vaguely tell it’s not real in the right lighting), our fusiform gyrus (the part that is meant for human facial recognition) is still activated. Think of the idea of Paredoila — seeing faces in nonhuman objects.
The Digital Seams
Every medium has its limitations in that the material seams eventually present itself to make the said medium aware of its own construction. The literal seams on a shirt that start to unravel over time, the paint chipping away on an old masterpiece, the experience of a RPG character intersecting into a boulder, or a head propelling into the 4th dimension.
The Digital Seams are a particular positioning point when it comes to asset creation, media study, technological implementation. Are we aiming to be aware of the constraints of the medium, or do we conceal the tools that generate a particular product? Should we try to open the black box of AI systems and algorithms to redistribute the knowledge asymmetry between users and corporations?
Axis and Assumptions
My therapist told me about the vertical axis of human dignity and the horizontal axis of belonging to an environment / relationships / systems. At the center of that axis is the three-dimensional interoceptive body that generates internal safety and movement. In order to be “full” or centered, we must fulfill these axes — it is a posited framework of how to preserve our human dignity as it relates to social positioning and personal growth. Because instead of definitions there are axes that suggest a movement — or shifting positional framework, I believe it is a better framework to think about how this relates to governing legislation on shifting definitions of human sanctity and our digital agency.
The idea of consent in the digital age shapes access to bodies from an asymmetrical power dynamic. Gaining consent is used as a tool of blanket power — a way to institutionalize the way corporations can loophole into extracting information from us. The fundamental question of understanding human and digital rights is: “what is the boundary of sovereignty?” Meaning how can we begin to understand what determines the axis of “justice” and democracy when the definitions surround such ambiguous factors of human experience and relationship? Can there even be a structure that uses conventional logic systems to determine a legitimate legislation that operates in benefiting the experience of users and their rights? In order to investigate these contentions it’s possible to perform a quantized spectral analysis of systems to illuminate systemic interconnections that can’t necessarily be applied at a broader scale. It is in the discovery and positioning of components — avatars, users, 3d viewports, performance, that allow us to perform a pinhole view into what should / shouldn’t be, and how to better understand ourselves and each other. It is important to acknowledge the time-based constraints of current structures for this spectral analysis, and it’s something I encourage for all speculations into our technocratic future.
Privacy and Likeness
If the line between real and Unreal is so thin, what should be done about the characters and bodies that we as users and developers generate and place into the digital ether? If my digital body is a part of me and used to express myself in networked spaces, do I have any autonomy over how my body is protected? Unfortunately, the line between identity and identifier is just as thin. If something is a part of my identity, this comes to a human rights issue. If an asset is an identifier and is part of a data body generated by a corporate platform, this is a different framework. Can a platform take my identity away from me? If identity is reproducible then what is the sanctity of our individuality in the first place? Granted, most of this anxiety surrounding individuality and identity is a western capitalist ideal, especially in the late stages of Corporate Corporeal Commodity. But if the threshold of the digital divide starts to undermine the tech world’s closely held ideals of digital dualism, we have to start thinking about how to treat these digital doubles. Clearly the idea of identity in networked spaces is extremely important to constituents of the net. We saw this with the SAG-AFTRA strike focusing on digital tools like AI and digital recreation. If anyone can use an actor’s likeness for their own cinema production, what is the purpose of being the entity in the flesh? Moreover, with the introduction of Deep Fakes we’re seeing many problems with CivitAI’s newly invested in platform that turns a blind eye to users generating bounties for nonconsensual porn creation. If a digital crime is committed against a digital body, what systems should be put into place so that the sanctity of the human mind and vertical axis of dignity is kept intact?
Digital Scaffolding
There is a particular contention surrounding the loyalty around tech platforms — facebook, instagram, TikTok, and even more specifically with gaming engines, Unity, Unreal, etc. that leaches into the status quo, preventing people from questioning their place within the larger network / web of technocracy. The idea of a “platform paradox”, or a “platform capitalism” that indicates the embedded infrastructure of a power inequity between the tech platform and the user tends to blindsight people from the recognition of the pre-monopolized diffuse network of accessible technological advancements in platforms — the primordial “Wild West” of tech developments (think 90s early internet culture) that generate our technocratic scaffolding. It evokes the particular dependency in our community that relies on feature requests rather than questioning the whole position. Rather than attuning to the idea of this temporal and cyclical positioning in which the diffuse and distributed builds that then consolidate and centralize to larger corporate structures and monopolized platforms, most tech developers accept the idea of simply “requesting features” rather than pioneering or diversifying the distributed network of tech platforms that would inherently govern their own set of values and structures. For example, the blind and loyal acceptance of Metahumans avatar creation software lends itself to a cultural paradigm that ensures the slow but secure positioning of larger companies as the ones in control and in power. Although, this is not to say that the onus of breaking the structures of tech capital is on the developer per se, but the cultural conversations that are being held between culture producers and “thinkers” must include the meta analysis of the embedded power dynamics inside of the interfaces and platforms used to generate cultural assets.
“We rely on companies and platforms to do the work that we want to do and so we’re inherently subservient to them and that dynamic makes it hard to question and draw attention to our tenancy” — in conversation with Dave Carroll, November 2023
When we think about the cyclicality of this temporal paradigm we can start to pinpoint the patterns emergent from this platform capitalism / platform paradox. From the progression from the early social media days of MySpace to the Meta overlords of today we can see a trend of essentially losing independence but gaining social and political power by aligning yourself with these monopolized powerful corporations.
The term Digital Tenancy originated in a conversation one evening with a dear friend and collaborator Grace Ward, where we mused about the parallels between real world tenancy and proprietary platforms, and its slipperiness. With all of these technological platform and legislative constraints that undermine a Digital Tenant’s ability to secure housing inside an avatar without the risk of having their data body surveilled and controlled by large corporations, we must seek to create alternative structures that redistribute agency over our likeness, identity, and safety in the third (and fourth) dimensions. To retain our vertical axis of human dignity, our horizontal axis of belonging, and our three dimensions of interoceptive and proprioceptive safety in all realms, we must fundamentally rework the role of technologists in creating our future digital scaffolding.
“In short, it makes a difference whether we see emerging technology as inaugurating a new regime of accumulation or as continuing earlier regimes.” — Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek
As artists and developers we have the opportunity to influence our technological future. We can tap into the boundlessness of possibilities and pluriversality to inform our decision making and creative practices that in turn, set the groundwork for the future. Unpacking and unlearning the bounds of capitalism, hyper individuality, and white supremacy rests not only with understanding our history, but also in conjunction with the prerequisite of practicing and understanding what it means to reject a conventional and hegemonic logic system. Once we can accept that it is possible for multiple and contradictory truths to exist in the same system, we can reject binary logic and black and white thinking and its dominion over our current hegemony. When Legacy Russell refers to Galloway’s Generic Difference theory in “The Interface Effect”, she’s talking about the idea of keeping all doors open, and accepting multiple narratives, truths, and possibilities; “Generic difference keeps all doors open, all boxes-ticked, unticked and those yet to be imagined beyond our wildest dreams of revolution — a possibility” (pg. 123). When I think about this in my own practice, I look to my relationship between myself (physical Adrienne) and my avatar (Avatar Lilith). We are not one, not two, but somewhere in between. I pull on this contradiction to seek knowledge beyond my own limited body — to pursue it in the face of the other, in the simulacra, in my Digital Tenancy.
