Avatar Creations

Home > STUDENT PROJECTS > Avatar Creations

Avatars serve as powerful tools for exploration, expression, and commentary, enabling artists to navigate and manipulate identity, reality, and fantasy. In class we explore the theatrical nature of avatars and their possible impact on our self-understanding.

3

In this exercise, students dealt with questions of performing the self in relation to digital culture. How do you present and embody yourself online and in social media? Where is the boundary between the self and an avatar, the physical body and the digital body? How can the notion of ‘self’ be shaped by avatars?

Students from Bard College Berlin were asked to create 3 avatars for themselves that move between the digital and the analog: a digital avatar, a stage avatar that builds on the digital avatar, and finally an AI generated avatar that builds on the stage avatar.

Each avatar creation revealed new insights into the relationship between digitality and performance, which inspired some students to create their final projects around their findings. Scroll down to read the full story.

THE STUDENT CREATORS

Ifigeneia Gianne

Jude Fieldman

Sanskriti Shrestha

Yixin Wang

THEIR DIGITAL AVATARS
STEP 1: Creating digital avatars that are a super-power version of the student creators.

Ifigeneia Gianne

Jude Fieldman

Sanskriti Shrestha

Yixin Wang

THEIR STAGE AVATARS
STEP 2: Performing the super-power avatar versions live on stage

THEIR AI-GENERATED AVATARS
Step 3: Manipulating the self-created avatar images with the help of an AI Image Mixer.

Sanskriti Shrestha AI Avatar 1

Sanskriti Shrestha AI Avatar 2

Sanskriti Shrestha AI Avatar 3

Yixin Wang AI Avatar 1

Yixin Wang AI Avatar 2

Yixin Wang AI Avatar 3

The more often students sent their self-portraits through the AI image generator, the more clearly AI systems revealed their biased nature: what became obvious was the (often racist and misogynist) stereotyping of the internet’s content, on the basis of which AI systems create their images. Yixin Wang took this conclusion as a starting point to create her final course project…

Reformation & Deformation: Races and Faces in AI

Yixin Wang’s interactive video installation “seeks not only to unravel the binary code but to untangle the very essence of AI—its understanding of race. The pixels on the screen hold more than just images—they encapsulate the biases of our collective past.”

Click here to read the artist's statement in pdf
Performed and devised by:

Jude Fieldman, Ifigeneia Gianne, Sanskriti Shrestha and Yixin Wang.

Details

Fall Semester 2023.
Bard Berlin.

OTHER STUDENT PROJECTS

GLITCH CREATIONS

INTERCAMPUS

BOGOTÁ PERFORMANCE LAB

Skip to content