Performative Avatars 005

Final Project ideations:

• What is your concept(s)?

• How will you achieve it?

• Any concept images/art / rough draft clips you've started to develop

• How does this concept respond to the discussions and topics covered in this class?

• If it is heavily influenced by any of the artworks of artists covered in this class make sure to mention it and why you're inspired by it.

• What technical or conceptual challenges are you still working through or anticipating?

• What feedback are you looking for?

For my final project, I want to combine it with my thesis. My thesis is a project that combines virtual and physical. Over the last few weeks, I've been trying to find a meaningful narrative way to connect these two parts, I thought about using music to achieve this and using synchronized movements among them, but none of them make sense to me.

Last week I started to work on one of my physical avatars; because it is all hand-made, there are some inevitable flaws on that which made me mad for a long time. After calming down and reviewing the physical puppet, I realized I set an unreasonable high expectation. First, it's my first time making this; I can't compare my work with those masterpieces. Second, when I got mad, I only put two days into making the puppet; there was no possibility to do excellent work in less than 48 hours.

The development of the puppet reminds me of the development of actual humans; we also enjoy setting high expectations for ourselves and are addicted to them. Some expectations are great; they help us broaden our horizons, quest for a better life, a healthier body, and a firmer inner world. But some expectation is nothing but anxiety. Here are so many kinds of stress, financial worries, debt worries, job worries, age of stress, and so on. And appearance anxiety is one of them. Moderate appearance anxiety is desirable; it will remind you to exercise, change unhealthy diet habits, sleep enough time. However, the world is full of unnecessary appearance anxiety, or in other words, extreme expectation.

I made a chart about the "weird" standards in Chinese social media platforms to tell a girl/woman if she is beautiful or not. Some of the descriptions are so strange that I'm not sure if I can translate them correctly.

Based on this, my idea is to build a "perfect" avatar that fits all of the standards above; it will be a kind of "Mary Sue" character but only exists in the virtual world. At the same time, those physical avatars with "huge" flaws will constantly change and run in the real world till the moment they choose not to chase the expectations at all.