"Virtual Relationships: The Dancer and the Avatar"
The authors argue recent technological advances in motion capture technology and visualizing software along with immersive interfaces in VR and AR have led to the permit a “fluid emotional and affective communication [between performer and avatar]” (62).
The authors claim that this advancement shifts the basis of virtual choreography away from mimicry or substitution of direct interaction and movement, to a new terrain in which “it is the way that physical attributes of proportion, gravity, muscularity and force, as well as mental attitude and the vitality of a dancer, are then digitally and aesthetically recomposed into the virtual avatar that can become revelatory” (62).
Related Readings
Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human
In many ways, Boellstorff set the ground for thinking about social relations in virtual worlds in his 2-year fieldwork in Second Life. Of particular interest to this project are the chapters on space and personhood. Defining place and defining being in place.
Self-transformation online through alternative presentations of self
This paper maps two dominant approaches to the causal function of self-transformation in digital communication technologies: the discursive approach and the embodiment approach.