Art Medium Too: Avatar, Art, and Assemblages

This article looks at the connections between avatars and art and proposes avatars as an art medium and the assembling or creating of avatars as an art-making process. The term assembling is used to indicate that avatars are assemblages in that they are combinations of representations (images), and the process of constructing an avatar involves putting together body parts (and clothes).Framed by Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of assemblage, avatar assembling constitutes the in-between space wherein new connections between art and identity play form and the possibility of a new art genre likewise takes shape. Three ways to conceive the connections between avatars and art are discussed. The first focuses on avatars as the subject of art, the second on avatars as performance art, and the third on connecting avatar reassembling with the process of art-making.