Abstract
The digital avatar has evolved from a marginal, pixelated figure in gaming to a hyper-real protagonist at the centre of visual culture. Animated by motion capture and rendered in game engines, avatars now occupy a continuum that stretches from ancient puppetry and animist ritual to contemporary performance art and capitalist spectacle. This paper situates the rise of photorealistic 3D avatars within a historical lineage of performing objects, from Indian puppetry and European mask traditions to the experiments of Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas, and net art pioneers. Focusing on artists such as Kate Cooper, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Sondra Perry, Ed Atkins, and Shu Lea Cheang, the discussion traces how avatars function both as tools of control and sites of resistance, exposing the limits of realism, labour, and embodiment in digital space. Corporate avatar platforms like MetaHuman and Omniverse promise seamless replication of human affect, yet artists deliberately emphasise glitches, fragility, and exhaustion to critique cultural assumptions about bodies, productivity, and capital. By reading avatars through the lenses of animism, the uncanny, and performance theory, this paper argues that digital puppetry is not only a technological phenomenon but a cultural and philosophical return of repressed animistic traditions, refracted through planetary infrastructures of computation, extraction, and media circulation.
Presenters
Jonah KingAssistant Professor of Interactive Digital Media, Visual Art and Technology, School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2026 Special Focus—The Image as Advocate: Shaping Cultural Conversations
KEYWORDS
Digital avatars Puppetry Animism Uncanny Performance
