"Beautiful" Avatars

0100101110101101.org recently published a list of Second Life's 13 most beautiful avatars and the press release circulated throughout the blogosphere. Curious, I went to look at the list, and what I found disappointed me; not only were the selected avatars not among the best I had seen, but worse, they were hardly better than average.

How were they "average"? Both as avatars and photos. The avatars themselves were all beautiful in the usual SL ways: nice skins mapped onto nice shapes. That just about all of the photos were closeups or even extreme closeups didn't help: so much of what makes an avatar a statement is her full appearance, including posture, clothing, hair, and accessories. It is very hard for most SL avatars to stand out when all you have is a face.

The best of the lot were the pictures of Aimee Weber, which showed her in a bit of a pose, giving some sense of her in-world personality. But Aimee Weber is Second Life's Jennifer Aniston: her avatar is beautiful and distinctive, but how many covers of People, Us, and In Touch does she really need to be on? Picking Aimee is just too easy.

It is, of course, very easy to criticize something as subjective as a top-10 beauty list. I want to do something more useful than that. I want to explore the criteria of beauty the collection suggests. First a compliment: Kudos for not showcasing only white females (which would be all too easy in SL): both genders and different races were included. But there were no furries or non-human avatars, no fashion-extreme vamps. The notion of "beauty" was Benetton shop-window multiculturalism beauty: race is a fashion we put on--Look at me! I'm the African Jennifer Aniston!

But the most important questions remain unasked: What is the soul of beauty in Second Life? Does Second Life have its own standard of beauty? The people behind the beautiful avatars exhibit at least superficially address these issues:

The portraits reflect Second Life aesthetics, featuring the bright colors, "artificial" light, broad flat areas, 3D shapes, and surreal perspectives that are typical of this virtual world.

Such a description applies to every MMOG I have ever seen and most video games in general since the NES. It isn't Second Life's aesthetics at all; it's video games. So we are still left to ask what Second Life's aesthetic is.
They continue:

Overall, the series draws on the technological developments which allow the creation of alternate identities within simulated worlds, and questions the impact such technologies have on art and society.

While this still doesn't get at anything in Second Life in particular--it seems to apply equally to text-based worlds like LamdaMOO--at least it brings up an interesting question (albeit one that has been asked in media studies circles for over a decade): How do simulated worlds "allow the creation of alternate identities"? More interesting (but not asked here) is how these alternate identities reflexively shape (or nihilistically pull the rug out from under) our "real" identities? And anyway (this is my question), how do a dozen or so extreme closeups of Second Life pixel-faces help us get at these issues?

They continue:

Despite the relative newness of using video game-derived source materials, the avatars' icons recall questions common to earlier eras of portraiture, including the cultural and psychological context of the images, and the relationships between high art and subculture, between contemporary art and "traditional" art forms, and between art and life itself.

Heavy rhetoric, but what does it mean? The analogy to portraiture is interesting, but what is the significance of portraiture in a world where our virtual faces are botoxxed into immobility by a technologically enforced lack of facial expression? Second Life avatars are profoundly expressive, but it is a misplaced real-life assumption that the expressiveness is centered in the face. This is a major flaw in the exhibit. (Another flaw is hosting it in a perfect reconstruction of the actual RL museum exhibit. Note to the organizers: in RL museums, we don't look with virtual 3D cameras floating 20 feet behind our heads, and your SL exhibit is in fact frustratingly incompatible with the everyday experience of being an avatar.)

I would argue that our true SL expressiveness comes not through the face but instead through (a) the disposition of the body as a whole--including race and gender, pose, fashion, accessories; (b) the backstories we provide ourselves in our profiles; and above all, (c) the words we say as we interact with our friends and the world through chat boxes and IM windows.

If I, in my way, embody some part of this "Second Life aesthetic," look for it in my words and look at my whole body (in where and what it is doing); look not at my face (which can tell you only the most rudimentary things: that I am Asian). And then forget about me: look for it in the words and bodies of those avatars not possible or practical in RL: the furries, mermaids, winged vampires, aliens. Their aesthetic goes far beyond their 3D-mesh cheekbones and pretty-texture eyes. What do these avatars tell us about how people live in Second Life, about where people find (and create) beauty in virtual reality?

As it stands, the exhibit "Second Life's 13 Most Beautiful Avatars" seems like a publicity stunt. Superficial notions of Second Life beauty can be passed off as "hip" for a now-credulous press, currently enamored with all those "cutting edge" people who are "driving" Web 2.0.

Even if they are, in fact, strangers here themselves.

Physiognomic Fluidity

Yesterday, I was hanging out with Mistress L and our friend, C., when L noticed that my legs seemed a little pointy around the hips. I was wearing jeans at the time, so I switched to a bikini bottom to take a closer look. It wasn't pretty (and I won't be showing any pictures).

We spent some time monkeying with sliders in the Appearance dialog, and though I managed to make my legs and posterior look freaky in many new ways, we failed to solve the problem. Wondering if it is really a problem with my avatar shape (I'd never noticed this before) or a bug in SL that was causing avatar shapes to render incorrectly, I decided that rather than moving sliders around, I'd just put on another shape.

The only catch was that this was a shape I bought as a noob, and it was a tall, large-breasted, curvy affair. And it wasn't Asian.

Knowing that I was about to present a shocking visage to my two friends, I warned them in IM that I was about to undergo a change in race. Apparently, my warning wasn't clear enough, because when a white Amazon of an alle suddenly materialized in front of them, there were vividly expressed gasps of shock.

I won't deny it was a bit of a shock to me to see myself as a white avatar--it has been almost 18 months (and 17/18s of my SL existence) since I was white--but at least I had seen it before. (Incidentally, you can too.) I was surprised initially by the intensity of the reaction with my friends. After all, in SL, we can all change our skins, hair, clothes--just about anything. Our bodies, our clothes, our fashions, and a large part of our identities are just files in a folder tree.

What I realized, though, is that although we can change these characteristics at any time with a click of the button, people change some of them more than others. We change hair and clothes all the time. I know almost no one who has ever changed gender in SL. And interestingly enough, while a lot of people change species--human, furry, elf, tiny--people seldom change their races within a species.

For my friends, who know I am Chinese-American, and who have only ever seen me as an Asian female, this little inventory change, done to help me troubleshoot a technical problem, caused a rupture in their experience of my identity.

I never did solve that problem--my legs/butt still look funny. It occurred to me as I wrote this, that perhaps I should, while wearing my Asian avatar, change genders to see whether that fixes my legs/butt. If I do, I'll be sure to do so in the privacy of my own skybox.