Document:Q10199

Artwork title:
“World of Female Avatars”

Artwork description:
“World of Female Avatars”
A net art project by Evelin Stermitz.
Coding by Jure Kodzoman, Ljiljana Perkovic and Loritz Zbigniew.
“World of Female Avatars” is an ongoing project established in the years 2005/06.
About the project
World of female avatars is a project for expanded understanding of women and their relation to their body. By using the internet as an artistic survey media as many different entries from different cultures as possible are collected. The public call for female body pictures and text with personal statements about the body is presented at this net art project. The submitted pictures are used for a digital collage to create new bodies - The avatars of female body, which are living in the cyber World of Female Avatars from now on. Just visit the virtual world and click for the virtual bodies and their statements! The project is implemented by using Flash, so you need to have Flash Player 8 installed.
Background of the project
As women always have been and are strongly connected to their body in a positive and/or negative sense, it could be supposed there is also a relation to it. In times of virtual reality, avatar and cyborg the body is not important in its natural matter anymore although in reality still in use. Adorno und Horkheimer described the "Interest on the Body" as deadly because of the disturbed use of the body as only in parts of prosthesis. Discussing the body in Post Modern Society means also to discuss different developments which changed the natural body in a cultural and an economic object. What remains from the body, if the body still exists? Some theories view the body as only natural, some as antagonistic to technology. Paul Virilio describes the body as static and passive, which is looking for action in multiple overbidding. The rise of New Media means for Virilio an important break between man and woman because of the absence of body presence. To be in virtual space like an angel as a third sex is a position of future androgyny. The body as artistic material in the early seventies is another major aspect of this project. Instead of using the own artistic body, others shall be involved in the project. By receiving different input sources new bodies are going to be constructed on the net.
The basic areas of interest of this artistic work are:
Body and technology -
Body and sex -
Absent body -
Body and picture -
Body and violence.
The debate of body in media art and in this project is as follows:
draft of third sex -
emphasis of traditional visions of sex -
disclosure of construction of social sex (gender) -
development of new body language.