create your avatar: character art in online communities
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<h1>create your avatar: character art in online communities</h1>
<h3>by willow red</h3>
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I have had an online presence since I was about 10 years old. From school friends, I heard about online games such as Minecraft, Star Stable, and Animal Jam and would play whenever a parent was done with serious computer usage. I had previously played console and online flash games as a younger child whenever I had the chance to access a device. These “virtual world” games were different, however. They offered a chance to create my own custom avatar and to explore an imaginary world via this character.
As I become more involved in virtual worlds, I subsequently gained interest in the player community. Virtual worlds are usually online games as well, in which players may chat and play with each other simultaneously. Given the combination of expansive, explorable worlds, the ability to embody a character of my choosing, and the ability to socialize, these worlds felt nearly as real to me as real life. As a citizen of these worlds, I was able to make friends and learn more via community-built forums and websites. This ecosystem was the start of my online life beyond video games, and on the internet. Thus, I entered the online community and culture. As an artist, I naturally gravitated particularly towards the art of these communities. Involved in both traditional and digital art spaces, I began to notice the cultural and conceptual differences.
Here, I define digital art as artwork created with the intention of being viewed on a website rather than a physical space. Although these works also tend to be created with digital drawing programs, this definition does not involve the choice of medium.
Avatars, or an alternate being in which we willingly project ourselves onto, are the core of why virtual world video games are so immersive. They provide an alternate reality for us to exist and a body in which anything becomes possible. Biological and physical limitations vanish. Our consciousness is briefly shifted to an alternate world, oftentimes a world that is more appealing than physical reality due to the sheer lack of these limitations. The experience of inhabiting an avatar is often subconscious. Using video games as the continuing example, when “you” die in game, players often say “I died!”. Clearly, they are referring to their digital character, but this language indicates a subtle shift of consciousness. Whatever happens to your avatar is felt as if it were your actual self. This shift can extend to non-digital beings as well; when a driver is rear-ended, they think “I got hit!”. Again, the car got hit, not the driver. Yet, as the controller of the car, they project themselves onto it.
This embodiment of nonexistent beings we find ourselves in is the subject of my interest. Video games are the clearest example of avatars, but this process is essential to the experience of having an online existence as a whole. In fact, the acknowledgement of a digital world at all means this nonphysical domain is now as real as the physical domain, such that unreal avatars become as real as actual people.
Being a user on a website or social media is far more abstract than being a user on a video game. Avatars in video games are perceived as “living” because they may be moved around like real creatures and seen by other players and recognized as another person also playing the game. Users on static media channels are only given a profile picture, username, and maybe a biography to tell others who they are. These sites are driven by user-generated content, so the persona of a user may be understood via their posts in addition to these settings. The notion of avatar is somewhat limited on these sites — there is less of a need to exist on forums, as they are mostly used as a tool to share and consume information. Many community members do have a desire to be perceived in some way online, however.
People’s desire to be seen generates the desire to construct an avatar themselves. Video games offer a template for users to accessorize, but there exists no template on most other online spaces; they have the freedom to be anything they wish. This is when characters are created. I will be using “character” to describe an avatar that has been conceptualized completely by its creator. Characters are avatars, in so that they are a being that a human is projecting themselves onto, but characters are specifically an avatar with an appearance and story that was invented by its owner.
Character avatars can be seen in most online communities. Avid users of image-sharing platforms, particularly members of fan communities, have almost certainly come across original character art. Original characters or “OCs” are most commonly characters in the form of visual art. Artists typically present OCs to the world via a reference sheet or similar- this consists of a full-body illustration of the character with any important details highlighted. The idea behind reference sheets is to provide a canon to keep the character appearing consistent no matter who draws them, a practice stemming from the animation industry. OC reference sheets also include written information about the character.
Within the category of OC art are ranks of self-insertion and identification. “Sona”, short for “persona” refers to a character that embodies the maker’s actual personality, or some portion of it. “Vent” OCs are used as an outlet for the creator’s personal traumas characterized by their suffering parallel to the artist’s. Some OCs lack the qualities of an avatar at all — they simply exist for aesthetics or personal enjoyment without necessarily reflecting the creator.
I have come to find digital art largely centers around characters, whether it be original or fan art of visual media. OCs are my primary example of digital art as they are almost always exclusively found in online spaces and are extremely prevalent in art communities throughout the internet. They are a category of art that was uniquely born on the web, for the web. More importantly, they encompass the meaning of an online avatar. For anyone viewing a user’s character art, a sona avatar is the user; it is the being they created to exist on the abstract landscape of the internet in their stead.
Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied’s essay Do You Believe in Users? coined the term “Digital Folklore”, which encapsulates the textual, visual, and audio culture and traditions that emerged from the dawn of home computing and internet access. Original character art is an integral facet of the visual landscape; it is digital folk art.
The lasting question when thinking about avatars and digital art is what is it doing for the community? Character creation is a mode of personal expression that allows for anonymity. Online spaces allow for internet users to be as open or hidden as they please. By adopting characters, they may find freedom in separating from their real identity and life and thus a sense of escapism into an alternate world. Character creation also offers control. A character may be anything imaginable, and digital artists often select to make custom creatures or species ranging from animals, to elves, to objects.
My introduction to digital art came via fan communities of video games but has extended into my own practice as a digital artist. Beginning as a teenager, I created characters as an outlet for my confusion of identity and depression. I had various “persona” characters, as well as a vent character to express my inner dialogues for me. These characters were manifested as digital drawings and animations. When I look back at them, I can clearly see the person I was at the time of their creation and who I wanted to be. I currently study art and visual culture at a higher institution. Although digital art is excluded from greater fine arts discussions and circles, I continue to create characters. I have found that creating art of characters works as a way to process reality and separate from the physical self. In this way, making art of character avatars is transcendental.
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<h1>Sources</h1>
<p>B. Coleman and Clay Shirky, Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation (Massachusetts; The MIT Press, 2011) </p>
<p>Gene McHugh, Post Internet, https://122909a.com.rhizome.org/?tag=avatar</p>
<p>Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, “Do You Believe in Users?” in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (Massachusetts; The MIT Press, 2015), pp. 1–5. </p>
<p>Karen Archey, “Bodies in Space: Identity, Sexuality, and the Abstraction of the Digital and Physical” in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (Massachusetts; The MIT Press, 2015), pp. 451–467. </</p>
<p>Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149–181, https://web.archive.org/web/20120214194015/http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html</p>
