Artist Talk

On Tuesday, May 3, I attended the latter portion of Tara Hutton’s SMP presentation. I found her use of avatars, particularly in online settings, to be very interesting. As a psychology major, I was really interested in the personalization aspects of using an avatar online, and how one uses different artistic choices in order to be expressive of oneself in a very anonymous online community.

Tara used examples from websites such as World of Warcraft, in which one’s avatar is entirely self-created and animated, which makes one’s avatar a digital, cartoonized representation of a person. This reminded me of our discussion in class of how a photograph is a representation of an object or person, of how it/they once was/were at a particular moment. Although Tara was not using photography, I still felt like there was a connection. In addition, online avatars can be edited at that time and in the future, and the same is true of photography. Photography is never necessarily an accurate representation of what we once saw, as we can easily put our own spin on it, through filtering, exposure, aperture, burning and dodging, and any number of other techniques.

I found Tara’s subject and presentation to be extremely relevant to today’s online forms of social media, an area I’ve chosen to examine in my psychology courses and will look at more in-depth in graduate school. I find it really interesting to look at how we choose to represent ourselves in an online situation that is truly anonymous. We can choose how we portray different aspects of our personality, our hobbies, our interests, and who we truly feel we are. Tara seemed to explore some of these ideas, and how we represent these aspects of ourselves through dolls and through other forms of artistic expression. Personally, I think it would be really interesting to combine these ideas of artistic expression through online forms of media like avatars and these aspects of the self in some sort of study, but that may also be the social psychology nerd in me talking. Ultimately, I found her presentation to be very interesting, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.