ABSTRACT
The role of the avatar configures practices in the separate traditions of spiritualism, performance, and techno-experience. Moreover, it also configures their interface. Increasingly, these traditions have informed one another to create a figure for a navigational, agential device in a virtual space. In articulating the experience of these realms, the techno has invoked the spiritual, the spiritual the techno, and performance has invoked both to stage their encounters. Each tradition has provided strategies of representation that help to compose the figure of the avatar. Spiritual traditions offer notions of incarnation and rites of transformation; technologies provide the capability of audiovisual effects in a virtual space, and performance provides an order of action, or gesture that is somehow other than the “real.” The virtual spaces the avatar inhabits are likewise particular to each tradition. The spiritual offers the sense of a transcendent space; the technological an immersive space, and the performative a characterological one. Spanning centuries from Sanskrit practices to online animations, the avatar continues to figure human subjectivity within virtual space.
