I wanted to find out more about the religious use of “avatar” (it comes from Sanskrit, a deity sends his avatar to our world, avatars cross boundaries between worlds) and instead serendipitously found an article about female golems, dolls and cyborgs in Latin American literature (you’ll need access to Jstor for the full text), which again led me to find a book that uses second person address and is about a woman who creates a female, Carlos Fuentes’s Aura, and that reminds me of those Digital Beauties, or for that matter, Seducity (though the avatars there are both female and male, it’s the female they show you first), and that I was thinking of perhaps writing about Galatea in my trial lecture about user-avatar relations. I’m starting to enjoy this 🙂

3 thoughts on “female avatars

  1. Bill Cole

    Your mention of Galatea made me think of Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.0, which is not a cybertext, but is about a man who creates (or helps create) a “female” artficial intelligence. Maybe for your post-defence reading list.

  2. Rayne

    Fascinating concept. I’d liken the parallel of username:avatar to that of linear math:cellular automata scripts.

    Resolving a problem using traditional linear mathematics requires interpretation, calculation, integration, effort whether on the part of the person solving the problem or the person(s) analyzing the problem and solution. A CA script resolves itself based on predefined “rules”, leaving much less to interpretation. There is a greater sense of agency in the first than in the later. Using “Lara” as an example, the text “Lara” requires much more interaction to resolve as an identity, whereas “Lara” as “Tombraider” avatar is preset (gender and appearance are defined).

    Wonder, too, about the physical processing differences between alphabetic representation and pictogram/graphics; are there other unconscious pre-existing limitations in either text or graphic due to the nature of human processing?

    Thanks for sharing — great food for thought.

  3. Alex

    Related

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Triple book talk: Watch James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me discuss our 2023 books

Thanks to everyone who came to the triple book talk of three recent books on machine vision by James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me, and thanks for excellent questions. Several people have emailed to asked if we recorded it, and yes we did! Here you go! James and Jussi’s books […]

Image on a black background of a human hand holding a graphic showing the word AI with a blue circuit board pattern inside surrounded by blurred blue and yellow dots and a concentric circular blue design.
AI and algorithmic culture Machine Vision

Four visual registers for imaginaries of machine vision

I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive.  De Seta, Gabriele, and Anya Shchetvina. “Imagining Machine […]

Do people flock to talks about ChatGPT because they are scared?

Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – but yesterday, Eirik Solheim said that every time […]