Review Of Avatara

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proximate comparisons; each of the multimedia presentations has a unique form of information retrieval and presentation. The table shows how the four projects overcome specific problems inherent in traditional media, and yet use traditional media to make their case. Finally, the table specifies the interactivity of each project.

Avatara by Donato Mancini, Flick Harrison and Jeremy Turner Vancouver: 536, 2003, DVD. 72 minutes Produced and distributed by 536, 536 east 20th Avenue, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V5V 1M8 Can$20 Review by Maximilian Forte, University College of Cape Breton

Tables Four and Five extend the information offered in Table One. Here we see how the projects were financed, published and distributed. These tables suggest the particular problems facing new technology: publics have to be educated to consume and use them, and publishers have to be willing to invest in the possibilities they represent. The addresses of the distributors are included.

William Gibson, a Vancouver-based novelist, who coined the term cyberspace in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, envisioned a set of virtual communities where interaction takes place through computers as a sort of consensual hallucination revolving around a graphic representation of data abstracted from the computers of millions of users. The notion of the avatar came into play in the 1992 novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson who envisioned fictional, graphic representations of individuals in cyberspace. In comes a new film, perhaps a new ethnographic film genre, bearing witness to and bringing to life the worlds envisioned by both Gibson and Stephenson.

SUMMARY This review suggests that each of these multimedia presentations offers new ways of doing visual research. The range of projects is huge: some have a relatively modest scope, and others are almost unimaginably complex, expensive and innovative. In all cases, these projects draw upon traditional media and extend their possibilities. The review hopes to make the argument that multimedia may usefully extend traditional visual methods, but that these projects are costly, demand highly specialized knowledge and skills, and require teamwork that extends from planning to project execution to distribution.

Kalki, represented by an animated, talking, purple horse head, introduces us to the world of Traveler by interviewing a rather articulate, blinking bunny head which also lip-syncs words spoken by an actual person. The bunny head, the avatar of a member of this computer-mediated association of chatters, is suspended in front of Kalki, against a backdrop of rotating stars and colourful geometric shapes forming a surreal landscape,

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the two avatars appearing to converse in the same place, while their human users are separated by thousands of miles. This is Avatara, a newly released film on DVD by 536, a Vancouver-based international artists’ collective that mounts exhibitions in both online and offline environments. The documentary will be of especial interest to those engaged in teaching and research at the intersection between visual analysis and new forms of sociability involving computer-mediated communication on the Internet. Indeed, as there is no other film shot completely ‘in world’, not only is this an invaluable teaching resource, but also a priceless ethnographic document of a sensually stimulating online community that has been in existence for most of the past 10 years. Donato Mancini, Flick Harrison and Jeremy Turner, the makers of Avatara, explain that it is ‘not a cartoon’. Indeed it is a feature-length documentary of a community embedded in an online, three-dimensional, voice chat program called ‘Digitalspace Traveler’ (see www.digitalspace.com/traveler/). Through 14 interviews with 18 members, the film-makers cover distinct chapters that can be viewed separately or as one connected stream. The chapters appear under the titles of Introduction, Community, Identity, Art, Wars and Loss. In the process, ‘life on the screen’ (Turkle 1995) is actually shown on the screen. What is also striking about this film is that it was not undertaken by academy-based social scientists, but by independent artists, who in turn conceive their product as something between a documentary and an installation piece. Jeremy Turner is an interdisciplinary artist, music composer, curator and art critic based in Vancouver, Canada. Turner explores many digital media, focusing especially on avatars, bots and singular audio compositions. Turner encountered Traveler around 2001 and introduced it to his colleagues, Mancini and Harrison, also based in Vancouver. Harrison is himself an active and recognized videographer, while Mancini is a prolific writer of essays on music history, (visual and textual) poetry, and is an experienced interviewer. The film-makers’ original intention was to produce a film about Traveler that focused more on the philosophy of being and existential issues as they relate to social life and identity in cyberspace, and these still do figure as prominent themes in the film. Indeed, a trailer to the film consists of a filmed, online interview with Pravin Pillay in Traveler, Pillay seen as zebra-striped sea horse floating in a blue sky over majestic snow-capped mountains. Pillay

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engages in a stream of philosophical musings over reality, questions of life, soul, meaning, duality of self and binary oppositions. The scene accentuates the film’s mode of portraying Traveler as a voyage through a mental topography; an exploration of the landscapes of the imaginary, inhabited by the creative projections of one’s self. As a result, the film would not only be useful for teaching in anthropology and sociology courses, undergraduate and advanced, but in a variety of other disciplines as well, such as media studies, philosophy and art history. Mancini explained to me that as the project evolved, he and his partners realized that the most fruitful approach would be simply to document the community, knowing that Traveler could disappear within a few years – in these terms, a virtual reinvention of Boasian ‘salvage ethnography’. Turner spent about six months becoming acquainted with the regular members of Traveler, in what was an admittedly difficult process of gaining trust, or building rapport as ethnographic fieldworkers would phrase it. Mancini also explained to me the many motivating factors that led to the making of this film, and it is worthwhile to quote his words at length, given the significance of this project: Our affection for the software (we LOVE the surreal, and strangely antiquated aesthetic of Traveler), our knowledge [that] the community of Traveler is of some historic importance and, not to sound overbearing, that it would be a small loss to humankind if there was no good record of the people, the place, and the software. No one else was going to do it, so we had to. We knew also that nothing like what we had in mind had been done before, and that a film made entirely ‘in-world’ would be absorbingly beautiful. To me it’s like looking at ghosts moving around in an aquarium. Some viewers have actually been unable to watch it for the quietly screaming undertone of loneliness one can detect in some of the interviews. Loneliness, remedied through the development of online sociability, is indeed one of the recurring themes in the statements of the main interviewees in the film. One member explained that even the level of medication for his anxiety disorder had been reduced by his doctor as a result of the positive effects of his participation in this online community. Another interviewee commented, ‘there are qualities in many of these people that are admirable … because of the people, that’s why we’re here’, dispelling the notion that Traveler is a mere game

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played by the bored. Indeed, as one member stated, ‘they’re not just avatars, that’s people I know, and I love’ em’. Transcending the confines and limitations of one’s earthly existence is another of the documentary’s recurring themes, as phrased by one of Traveler’s members: ‘in here there is no death, no physical pain, no injury, no hunger’. In extreme cases, participation in this online world sometimes has a direct physical correlation with members’ physical lives in their offline settings, with several admitting to having remained logged into Traveler for days on end, for going without sleep for almost three days, or simply forgetting to eat. Disembodied physical individualities, reinvented online through individually reworked avatars, interacting, almost fusing with other members, are ubiquitous features of this film. One member even describes Traveler as a ‘collective intellect’, another calling it ‘a Mecca for minds’. A conception of community is strongly held by the interviewed members as well, pointing to community rituals performed within Traveler, i.e. soccer games, drag racing, dancing, weddings and even memorial services. Indeed, Traveler even boasts of an in-house chapel with a regular lay cleric who leads those attending services in prayer and discussion of passages in the Bible. As with everything else, the chapel is graphically represented as such, where members can move in three dimensions, occupy pews and listen to the sermons delivered by ‘Steve’, located in Queensland, Australia, and represented by a hovering zebra-striped sea horse avatar. Possibly one of the more comical moments in the film – yet instructive as to the creation of rules and collective norm construction – has to do with ‘avatar wars’. These conflicts consist of largely disruptive and anti-social behaviour, such as ‘bonking’ another avatar by deliberately bumping into it (this interrupted one of the interviews in fact), or creating such gigantic avatars that they easily occupy an entire room. Wars, in the sense described by the informants, involved hacking into servers hosting various rooms, and some of the server owners and room creators attest to having nightmares of imminent hacker activities. Avatara is a virtual ethnographic film shot online. As with many other virtual ethnographies, it has its peculiar advantages and shortcomings. The viewer’s audio-visual participation in Traveler is clearly a very engaging feature of this film. The nature of Traveler, animated, threedimensional, with all communication conducted over

microphones, allows for a more dynamic ethnographic film than would have otherwise been possible with textbased chat. The ‘everydayness’ of the individuals interviewed lends the film a certain degree of credibility. The film quality is itself beyond reproach, with camera angles chosen with obvious care, often showing the interviewer rotating around a room as he shifted from one informant to another, with other members hovering nearby and listening to the interview. A few of the online social events are also filmed, such as the dances or the drag races. Amongst the shortcomings of the film, from an ethnographic vantage point, is that there is little information within the film itself about how informants were selected and whether or not they form a representative sample of the online community. ‘Off camera’, Mancini explained to me that in fact the ‘stars’ of Traveler were chosen as the key informants, that is the regular, most tenacious participants. While viewing the film, I often found myself wondering if there was too much of a motivated thematic selectivity, that is, if themes of affectivity and collectivity had not been overemphasized. Perhaps another shortcoming of this, as with other virtual ethnographies, is that the information is gathered completely ‘in-world’. An even more compelling documentary, and one that would be significantly more difficult to mount (not to mention costly and with knotted issues of confidentiality), would be one such as this yet coupled with some offline documentation of Traveler’s members’ lives, perhaps accompanying them as they go online, interviewing them offline as they participate online. At times I was left wishing for less narration, and less of the formal interview style that dominates the film, in favour of simply witnessing regular activities and hearing members converse with each other, a degree of ‘lived reality’ that seems to be sorely lacking in the film. Nevertheless, Avatara is richly textured documentary that currently makes an unrivalled and highly innovative contribution to the field of digital visual research, as critical to teaching and research in the wider field of Cyber studies as any of the more prominent Cyberpunk novels or edited collections of papers on virtual communities and cybercultures, and certainly a necessary complement to all of these resources.

REFERENCE Turkle, S. 1995. Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.