author: Matteo Bittanti (concept, editing), Figure Prints (actual execution)
title: Growing Avatars
year: 2011
format: sculptures (currently, five 3D prints of Xbox Live avatars)
exhibited at: FASHION GAME, May 17 2011, Rimini Italy
related news: forthcoming essay - in Italian + English
gallery set up: Each growing avatar is to be displayed in one glass jar - such as this one. Please note that top of each jar should be left open for the avatars to breathe. The glass jar has to be transparent and completely empty aside from a layer of black stones at the bottom. Each glass jar is to be placed on top of a black or white pedestal, such as this one. On an additional pedestal, located either at the right or at the left the avatars, a silver or graphite iPod Nano connected to a portable speaker plays an 8-bit version of Talk Talk's "It's My Life" (not looped). Visitors are encouraged to play the song as they contemplate the growing avatars and ponder life's meaning.
It's My Life 8-Bit - Talk Talk
Matteo Bittanti, Growing avatars, digital photograph of 3D prints, 2011
artist statement
In Hinduism, an avatar, Hindustani: [ˈəvət̪ɑːr], English: /ˈæv.ə.tɑːr/, (avatāra: Devanagari अवतार, Sanskrit for "descent" [viz., from heaven to earth]) is a deliberate descent of a deity from heaven to earth, or a descent of the Supreme Being (i.e., Vishnu for Vaishnavites) and is mostly translated into English as "incarnation", but more accurately as "appearance" or "manifestation". The Sanskrit noun avatāra is derived from the verbal root tṝ "to cross over", joined with the prefix ava "off , away , down". (Wikipedia)
"I do not have a Second Life, but if I did my avatar would be a real avatar" (Richard Todd, 2008: xiii)
One day, it hits you.
You suddenly realize that the actions and activities you enact, execute, and perform in virtual worlds, social networks, and game environments are real.
In fact, they are more real than anything you do in the so-called real-life.
They have substantial ontological consistency.
The mean something.
To you, at least.
I always wanted to save, preserve, and keep some of those actions and activities, agencies and agents, from vanishing forever.
My identity may be ephemeral, but my avatars are real.
Take this guy, for instance: SuperMatt.
SuperMatt doesn't really do much aside from running.
And bragging.
He runs and brags. Which translates directly into data. Stats about distances, calories, workouts. Questions of sciences. Science and progress.
His fashion style is fairly limited: sports gear. He only wears Nike trainers. Mostly black. And shorts. And t-shirts. He listens to the music, although the headphones seem to be connected to his belly button. He always wears Ray Bans sunglasses, even when it rains. Especially when it rains.
And then there's manybits.
manybits lives on EA's Sports Active website. A pixelated being, manybits sees reality in black and white. With some shades of gray. He is not very popular - in fact, he has no friends. He keeps it to himself. But he is very focused. In fact, he has reached 27 milestones so far. He once reached a max heart rate of 184 bpm. He almost died that day.
And then there's matteo bittanti's personas, an art installation by Aaron Zinman that displays one person's online activities via a colorful chart. Here's mine:
And then there's Mr. Bit.
Mr. Bit lives in Gadgeland, a section of WIRED.it Like Futurama's heads-in-a-jar, he seems to be floating around, in some kind of hyper-uranium of ocean bits. He writes about technology, and art, and games for WIRED. He always wears Ray Bans sunglasses, even when he writes. Especially when he writes.
The avatar list is long.
My identity is scattered among several sites where different kinds of performances are enacted (and I am sure yours is too).
I spend a considerable amount of time inside game worlds that I access through my Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
My avatars are real.
So, I felt I needed to collect myself.
Truth is, I have been collecting for a while.
Not necessarily in the physical sense.
I keep filling up my hard drives with useless data. Words, photos, videos...
Bits. So. Many. Bits.
Collecting my articles, texts, posts, entries, tweets, likes and the likes seemed like a trivial pursuit. An activity doomed to fail. A bizarre mixture of hubris and uselessness.
It seemed more productive to collect the sources of that inane production.
My avatars.
They are more real than my so-called self, which is intangible, immaterial, invisible, abstract.
This:
is more real than this:
My avatars are not figments of my imagination.
They form the very fabric of my own realities.
For this project, I decided to grant some of my digital avatars - my Xbox Live counterparts - a tangible consistency, an existence of atoms. They truly deserve it. They work so hard.
Time had come, for them, to leave the screens.
To jump out of Windows.
So I printed five of my alter egos - each character embodies one of the many roles I play - the Milanese, the professor, the curator... and so on.
Each character wears different attires (note 1).
3D printing is the apogee of the process of individualization that began a couple of centuries ago. Identity is a substained activity that requires constant work. I have a responsibility to invent myself, to produce my own identities, to actualize myself. I must become my avatar.
In short, I have started printing and collecting miniatures of myself.
After all, I have always wanted to be my own action figure.
I figured myself as a figurine.
Now I cal hold myself.
Hold myself in the palm of my hand.
My plenitude and shallowness is just a few inches tall.
However, Susan Stewart (1993) reminds us that "A reduction in dimensions does not produce a corresponding reduction in significance" (43)
I'm both the producer and consumer of my own objectified persona.
The miniature encapsulates the detailes of a role, a life, a performance.
This project is about self-realization and self-replication. Productivity and self-production.
After all: "We are born wanting to be had and held, born collectible" (William Davies King, 2008: 75)
These statuettes are physical manifestations of interactions and intersections.
Life is a game to play. A quest for identity. Identity is not found, but created. You are the result of the mainstreaming of customization. To become a person is to craft your persona via a sufficiently sophisticated editor. Mass-production of uniqueness. It not personal, it's personalization.
I nurture my avatars. I keep them safe, in glass jars.
They grow, like plants. They have a life on their own.
As Stewart writes:
The toy is the physical embodiment of the fiction: it is a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for narrative. The toy opens an interior world, lending itself to fantasy and privacy in a way that the abstract space, the playground, of social play does not. To toy with something is to manipulate it, to try it out within sets of contexts, none of which is determinative. [...] The toy world presents a projection of the world of everyday life; this real world is miniaturized or giganticized in such a way as to test the relation between materiality and meaning. (56, 57)
According to King, "To collect is to write a life" (2008: 38)
I believe that "To collect is to print a life".
San Francisco, May 11 2011
Matteo Bittanti
NOTES
(1) Alas, at this point I cannot print Adidas and Diesel virtual garments as Figure Prints does not own the rights - bummer - I feel incomplete as these brands define my identity: "As Renzo Rosso of Diesel Jeans has said: "We don't sell a product, we sell a style of life... The Diesel concept is everything" (quoted by Lars Svendsen 2006, 142). Among fashion brands, Diesel Jeans has been one of the most active in colonizing virtual worlds. A Diesel virtual store operates inside Playstation HOME, Sony PlayStation's uber commodified and gentrified Second Life clone.
Diesel store, PlayStation Home, 2009
PRESENTATIONS
set (2011): Download Growing-avatars_matteo-bittanti
making of (2011) Download Growing-avatars_making-of_matteo-bittanti
FAQ
What is collecting?
"Collecting is a way of linking past, present, and future. Objects from the past get collected in the present to preserve them for the future. Collecting processes presence, meanwhile articulating the mysteries of desire." (King, 27)
What is the relationship between art and collecting?
"Collecting, like art, is a way of coming to terms with the strangeness of the world" (King, 76)
"[C]ollecting is not all pathology. Indeed, collecting can come very close to what is involved in the making of art. The assemblage of disparate elements into a totality evokes the satisfying metaphor of wholeness and unity, and the containtment of display of what is valuable involves the same questions of form and function that any artist must ask" (King, 126)
"The collection is a form of art as play, a form involving the reframing of objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context" (Stewart, 151)
Why do you collect?
"The compulsion to collect is a struggle against death" (King, 33)
"As an answer to a pathetic need and an anguished sense of loss, this collection embodies the essence of what it is, for many to collect. It also lacks exactly what justifies collecting for most people, which is substance (almost entirely) and value (entirely)." (King, 17)
Why collecting miniature versions of yourself?
"The essence of most collecting is to have the world in miniature." (King, 11)
"The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, versions of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination." (Stewart, 69)
"The collecting comes from an unconscious aspect of myself, so it's all predicate. The subject and object are self and memory" (King, 128-129)
How long will you keep collecting miniatures?
"The bigger the collection gets, the harder it is to keep. The bigger the collection gets, the more completely it represents me and my history, and the more I feel oppressed by it" (King, 93)
What is the relationship between collecting and performing?
"Collections are not merely owned, they are performed." (King, 43)
Are these figurines "alive", in a metaphysical sense?
As long as I am. Besides, "Collectibles have soul" (King, 33)
The miniature "[M]arks the pure body, the inorganic body of the machine and its repetition of a death that is thereby not a death." (Stewart, 69)
Are the "growing avatars" for sale?
No.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
King, William Davies, Collections of Nothing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Stewart, Susan, On Longing. Narratives of the MIniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Svendsen, Lars, Fashion. A Philosophy, London: Reakton Books, 2006.
Todd, Richard, The Thing Itself. On the Search for Autenthicity, New York: Penguin, 2008.
Wikipedia, avatar, last accessed: May 14 2011.
RELATED
Matteo Bittanti, AVATARS, Stanford University, April 10 2009
SPECIAL THANKS
John Cain
