Me and My Avatar
The talk ‘Me and My Avatar’ was held at Processing Day, Copenhagen & Artsformation Conference, Brussels in October – November, 2023 and explores our digital and physical identities.
In the 1990s the world wide web became part of our lives. The Internet opened up for new experiments with identity, gender and sexuality – online you can be whoever you want and it is the place for the fulfillment of many dreams and fantasies.
Perhaps our online lives in the 1990s have even paved the way for the explosion of possible identities that unfold across the Internet and the physical world? What characterizes parts of our online lives is that we often appear with profiles or avatars that we come up with ourselves, and to one extent or another we have all learned to experiment online.
Now many are beginning to take their experiences into the physical world. Our physical and online lives are getting closer and closer together, and not only because of technologies such as AR and VR and the ubiquity of smartphones, but because our digital identities are becoming more important to us and we need to make the different formats coexist across realities.