By Mogens Jacobsen / Art Magne
Mogens Jacobsen is an artist who has been working with digital art and audio since 1983. In the 1990ties he was primarily operating within net.art. And in 1995 he was a founding member of the Danish art group "The Artnode Foundation". In the beginning of the current millennium, he grew tired of the GUI (graphical user interface) as an artistic medium. From that time he has mainly been working with networked physical installations.
Avatars – style & look
It seems like there are 2 main lines in styling your avatars: The perfect western (mostly white) Hollywood body and the (European?) subversive Goth-look.
My avatar – Art Magne – is not a primary player in my project. But only a body to operate in SL. I really spend some time trying to style the looks by using SL standard parameters only (no tricky code and no texture mapping). But still I look like a Goth-person.
Tags:
avatars,
fashion,
look,
style
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3 Comments
Styling my avatar
-Human, animal or disembodied?
I have been in SL for a while, and started out styling my avatar realistically, meaning constructing my avatar as close to my RL looks. This must be what you refer to as the Hollywood look. After some time in SL I began wondering why I never met any avatars with an african look. Exploring the skin fashion at several stores I discovered that the look of an avatar with “Hollywood” styling was mostly to be caucasian or mongolic. It took me some effort to find a dark skin, and I never found a body shape that fitted, because the parameters of the avatar body is of caucasian standards. But I found a very fine afro wig.
After experiencing SL with my avatar sculpted as a human body I wanted to find out how SL would be without a body. You can buy or construct bodies to wear, which disguises the human parameters of the avatar so it looks as if your avatar has a non-human form. In that way your avatar can be an animal, a science fiction figur or even an object of some kind. Forming an avatar in this way is done by wearing a costume as your “body”. Sometimes the human limbs protude from the “body”, because you can never get rid of your basic avatar parts.
At the moment my avatar is an electric eye ball with two green limbs protuding. This is because I am exploring the differences between having a virtual body in cyberspace compared to being as disembodied as possible.
I find that many of the citizens in SL have a relationship to their avatars as being some kind of representation of their RL subject; either realistically or as a fantasy projection. Being a ball, as I am currently represented, I am met in a very different way socially than I was used to, having a well proportioned female body. This happens although I am still being met as a female, because of my very common female name. The social aspects of SL is a large part of the world. Therefore I find it very interesting to explore the different avatar representations; these being human, animal or, if possible, disembodied.
When my avatar was styled with an african look, I experienced racism, wich was a very rich experience to me, as I am caucasian in a caucassian society. In this way SL can be used for constructive means in understanding of different cultures.
There a lots of very common branches of avatars with there own communities.
Furry
Cyberpunk
Steampunk
Jedi – (which by the way is the first most common religion in SL, “the force”)
Startrek
to mention a few
– There is some quite amazing content to found in these self run mostly role playing based communities, some of the best in SL.
I am a Furry in SL, and there is also a sort of racism tword this group as well. I have also encountered many hate groups and anti-Furry groups through my travels. Some have even tried crashing or spamming sims that are geared tword furries.