On the belief in avatars: what on earth have the aesthetics of the Byzantine icons to do with the avatar in social technologies?

摘要

This article looks at the digital portrait used in the form of avatars in various online worlds and communication networks. It describes an ongoing modal shift from an ontological understanding of the portrait towards the portrait as performative acting.rnIn accordance with the Western semiotic divide between representational fiction and material reality proper, the avatar-portrait is often still described as a representation that depicts the subject on the basis of a conceptual segregation between the living subject and the portrait. But the avatar-portrait functions as embodiment, thereby fulfilling a mainly performative purpose that triggers the participant's belief in the other's avatar.rnThe paper looks at Eastern iconology, where the iconic portrait is an energetic transmitter in which the depiction and the depicted converge in the belief in the realness of the picture. Key concepts such as prototype, archetype and inverse perspective are discussed and applied to the art piece Can You See Me Now? by Blast Theory.