Transworld Identity Exhibit Highlights Independence of Avatar from Virtual World

Hanging out at media preview of The Caerleon Museum of Identity

People experience avatarian life in different ways. For some, it's merely an extension of atomic identity with an overt connection to the underlying human. Others create a pseudonymous digital identity that takes on a life of its own with no public connection to its atomic counterpart. Although many of us tend to think about those two ways of approaching virtual identity as binary poles, they are really waypoints on a continuum that transcends our best attempts to place the mysteries of life into nice little boxes.

Art and story offer a way to escape the clutches of our categorizing and reductionist mentality. I think that as a group, the exhibits at The Caerleon Museum of Identity offer a more mind-opening look at virtual identity than any collection of academic papers.

After wrestling for a year with what I would contribute, I finally decided to focus on the transworld nature of avatar identity:

Avatar Identities that were born in Second Life now extend into other virtual worlds, MMOs, social networks, blogs, media sharing sites and atomic human consciousness. Every work that I included in this exhibit was created either completely or primarily outside of a virtual world to illustrate the independence of avatar-based identity from any particular  platform or medium. Artist's Statement for my Transworld Identity exhibit in The Caerleon Museum of Identity.

The works include drawings created on an iPad, an action figure photo comic, and a composited conversation between a virtual Botgirl and a RL ventriloquist dummy. Although they do not form a linear narrative, the conceptual approach weaves its own story of a virtual muse that has escaped into the physical world.

I invite you to come see the entire show for yourself.  It opens this Saturday at 12:00pm SLT on Caerleon Isle and will continue through the month of October.