What do avatars want now? Posthuman embodiment and the technological sublime

This article connects the current fascination with immersive experience to the question of embodiment and representation by avatar presence. It also references the ‘pictorial’ and ‘affective’ turns in theory in order to discern ‘what avatars want’, a play on the cultural theorist W. J. T. Mitchell's ideas. We propose that ‘truth’ or ‘real’ has very little to do with how we feel about our avatar creations which are in effect self-portraits. Their existence reveals our desires, yearnings, fears and insecurities. The avatar is an animated, performed image which mirrors our desire to inject it with subjectivity, while at the same time thinking of it as an object. Avatar embodiment also points us to the technological sublime. Reflecting the natural sublime, we argue that the technological version is part and parcel of our relationship to self and our avatar instantiations.