Christian Petersen over at ArtSlant has published a great interview : The Wednesday Web Artist of the Week: LaTurbo Avedon. This is an interview with digital/virtual artist, LaTurbo Avedon but what makes the interview great for me is that it goes beyond artwork and delves into areas of avatar identity, creative spaces and much more.
I speak a lot about how good Draxtor Despres Drax Files : World Makers series is, because it gets to the real physical person behind the avatar, but Christian highlights another way of how avatars can evolve and how lines between the physical and virtual world can blur :
The artist LaTurbo Avedon may be a computer-created avatar but she is very much alive. Her identity has been created through very real experiences and interactions over numerous websites, social platforms, and gaming consoles. The notion that there is a “real” person behind the avatar becomes increasingly meaningless as the division between all of our online and IRL identities blur and dissipate.
That’s a fascinating way of looking at how avatars can evolve. LaTurbo Avedon has evolved via many platforms but she has deep roots in Second Life which go all the way back to 2006 and in her time in Second Life LaTurbo built and ran a club, which exemplifies a strong engagement with the environment because running clubs, even in the virtual world, is not as easy as some may think.
The article talks about the possibilities that virtual space offers for creating art that would not be feasible in the physical world and, rather interestingly, LaTurbo talks about the possibilities for our avatars to represent something very different from our physical self, but LaTurbo feels that many people don’t take this route :
A sandbox world like Second Life creates the opportunity for users to build and be anything they wish. Someone could choose to be a rock or a plant or something with no correlation to the physical world at all. It is this possibility that I think still exceeds many of the users, as most defer their virtual presence to tropes of idealized physiques. I don’t think this is necessarily a negative thing, but it reflects a significant amount on how users in our time envision themselves in virtual space.
This a subject matter which could get very deep and for which I could waffle on for pages about, but I’ll keep this relatively brief!
LaTurbo also talks about how her work can exist in different forms in the physical and virtual world. This is exemplified by way of an exhibition from 2013, The Transfer Gallery – New Sculpt. LaTurbo wasn’t at the physical gallery, she was at a Second Life recreation and people could come and talk to her via a terminal at the exhibition.
These sort of shared and blurred lines between physical and virtual worlds highlight not only different ways of looking at the virtual world experience, they also raise issues of whether a more immersive VR may blur these lines even more.
LaTurbo doesn’t limit herself to Second Life, she has worked with Unity and has been working with VR.
The interview over at ArtSlant is really interesting, on many levels, if you have time it’s well worth a read.