In doing so i also added feathers or fur, it took away focus from the naked feeling of the first avatar, i was feeling more protected. Very much like how clothes protects my physical body,
Even thou it looked a little bit more dull in the game engine i still loved it so much, it was nice to have all these colors and details for me to obseve on my own body , i liked the uneven ness of it even thou its a factor of anxiety that my physical body have uneven skin, in my avatar i appriciated it because it made it exciting.
I was drawn to the idea of how a body is perceived when you experience body dysmorphia. It will make you feel lumpy, wrinkly, wobbly and deformed.
Posthumanism has been criticised for its erasure of the embodiment, rendering it as something not essential to human existence.
at this point it was looking more like plastic. I was trying to dehumanize the avatar and make it more etherial i think.
I’m wondering if the avatars could work as different autonomous agents filling different functions and desires of my own collective sense?
I choose to see this as an inner confusion, WE are content it's just some internal struggles and self-concerning issues. I’m dealing with it.
At one point i started to add more details to the skin and decorate it in different abstract water and perl materials, it still was looking very much like skin but the transformation had begun.
Reading the work journal now i feel like i was bare and leaking all the time, with no filter between me and the world and my emotions just sweating out from my pores
The more muscles i have visible on my body the better i feel about it. I realized whern zooming in that muscles and uneaven bumps actually look the same
In the end of the project i started adding colors and more textures to my avatar, it reminded me of how much i llike the wabi sabi och color stains and working with physical materials, i instantly loved the skin of the avatar and got really excited by all the colors.
The first skin of the avatar was very bare and naked, it reflected how i was feeling in the beginning too in the project .
Today the avatar took on a different shape, its body fluids almost shaping sharp shields and beautiful pearls making me think of something ethereal and angelic, like the mediaeval arch angels or the angels from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.
. I started thinking about Hilma af Klint and her art practice, with seanses , receiving information from a higher self ( or masters as she called them*)
During the course of the project the face of the avatar was possibly the thing that changed the least. I did not find myself having very much interest in it.
I tended to be most fond of the visuals where the face was covered completley of partly by something more abstract. Much like a mask. as the avatar already serves as a mask it was a mask on a mask.
I feel like the avatar is missing nature too, causing the seed of homesickness to grow a forest from inside.
they feel really accurate about how I feel about my body, somewhat nice and scattered. Fractured in time, unperfect but anyways beautiful in its laggy glitching state of being.
This face was cute but I dident feel like it was mee. It was too clean , to cute and i dident have an emotional connection to it.
Its perticular how no eyes or just one circle feelt better than having 3 sets of eyes. is it the assosiations to spiders perhaps. Althou i dont have anything against spiders,( i think they can be pretty cute) insects is just not something I ever identified with i think.
When showing a friend the final version of the face they said it reminded them of the arch angels or how angels are actualy described in the bibel. I serched it and found that it was quite a similar vibe and i found it very amusing and liked the design even more so after.
I got home and was completely exhausted for some days, then I started making music and got so absorbed in recording sounds with my noisebox and OP-Z that I really just lost track of time a week.
I was also trying to move away from the human 2 par of eyes and tried having 3, this never made it into the engine because i just feelt it was wrong in the idea state already.
Anyways i'm happy that i'm enjoying eating food and I've started to pole again and feel strong and quite good with my body.
it was interesting to me that i never craved to be able to do facial expression. as my physical face is quite expressive and ive always sort of feel like its happening to much in it ( was recently talking to a friend who also experience this feeling) which made me realize that i feel like its a relief to me to have and avatar that dont show any expression.
my brain has been hyper alert and focused. I've almost got the full body tracking working with the new headset
I tried both hollow constructions and solid for my avatar. Althoug i found it more exsiting to explore my body while hollow I liked it more when it was taking up more space as it did in the solid one .
Ive experienced that the more i dress up for myself and dont leave the appartment i feel better about my physical apparence. or if im just going out but not meeting anyone. But if im dressing up to see someone i start feeling more anxious and insecure.
Reflection on my own body, when I got to pole class today I felt really horrible. I was disgusted with my body and looked away from it in the mirror, I thought my face looked weird. At the end of class I felt beautiful and strong, but nothing really had changed in my body just how I viewed it.
Electric waves go through my body and I feel the tension of the fabric of the universe. I've been alone for most of the last week and it feels good
The high heels is something reoccuring, i hardly ever wear them outsde, just in the appartment when im by myslef, im wondering what this act of dressing up for myself is. is it similar to putting on hte avatar and dancing for myself.
When i was yunger i used to have huge complex ove rmy fingers because i thought they where big and hairy, which now seems so absurb to me , they are just normal hands. I wonder if the appriciation for my hands is connected to that they enable me to do what i love?
At first I thought having hands and fingers was going to be more cenrtal to feeling less ristricted in VR but it dident affect it so much and in the end i dident bother adding it to my avatar.
I get this overwhelming feeling that things are maybe starting to fall into place, my body as infected and weak as it is now is purging everything that didn't serve me before
the limbs that was replacing my legs when in the cute ailien avatar feelt wierd but when having limbs recembling my own physical and then adding more tentacles or things from them i experienced it to enhance my embodiment and experiende.
"One can change oneself, one can become an entirely different person.
The essence of being is change."
-James Bridle
I like how the body transforms weirdly when I extend my arms over my head, it feels like my rib cage expands and changes. It feels good.
The emotional representation of my body. At the start of the research I was dealing with a lot of sorrow work and longing to be in nature.
The representation of how my body feels like at times when i have a lot of body dissonance.
I feel lumpy, sweaty and angsty. uneven disproportional.
it was so nice to have the long hair to whip a round , i want it to be longer, it was also so fascinating to look inside me, i wanted the rib cage to stick out more so that i could look down inside myself
I liked the clipping and being able to touch through myself, it made me have a weird sensation in my body. Like your anticipating touch so much your brain almost trick you to feel it
During the project I satarted doing a lot of 3d scans of my body in different outfits. Sometimes I use fashion and putting togheter outfits as a form of physical avatar. It helps with the negative feeligs about my body because i feel like i give attention to my body, i drape it in something presious and beutiful. Clothes also hold sentimental and emotional value for me and since the loss of my grandma ive found myself dressing in her clothes and jewelery as a way to deal with the emotions.
It can also be a way to hide away my body or parts of it i dont like since i go trough periods when i never wear anything fitted.
the hands feel to static and straight, i like that it doesn't have hands that feels right, but maybe it would feel good to have long things to whip around with the hands?
I wanna drape it in luxury, like how I want to drape myself in luxury. I feel like this avatar is a manifestation of my own body.
when i modelled it I thought it would feel like a big body but in VR it actually feels slim and i want to see more of the body so i'll try and flesh it out a bit to see how that feels
Some of the 3D scans really captures my mood at the time, in this one I'm wearing the jacked from my grandpa that also passed away and hugging my dog in an embrace. Astro have always been a great emotional support and a way for me to connect to my body and others when overwhelming emtions have been present.
At days when i was feeling very body dysmorphic i realized after looking at the 3d scans of myself that my self image became more holistic and grounded. Even thou they where more distrought and broken i found them beutiful and reasuring.
R00T agreed to join me for the dance performance and will come to neos to check it out tomorrow so I'm very excited about that and to have her perform with me
I tried out an avatar that was less human at a point in the project. Since it was a comission and part of my freelance work i first dident count it into my research but realized that it informed my decisions on however to go forward with a less antromorphic avatar. I did not enjoy beeing in this avtar at all, it was very uncomfortable that my legs was just flopping around event thou i did enjoy seeing other is this avatar.
Even thou the hands and arms are not to far from how the final design turned out on my other avatar, on this one they just feelt to big and clumpsy to move in.
So many things to focus on at the same time, I feel disoriented. I've had so much inspiration lately but don't have the time to compound and make sense of anything.
i feel like these petals really look like my vision for it, it makes the avatar take up more space and hopefully it will feel nice in VR
A 3d scann i did a manipulation on. The smoke and electric geometry that comes emerging out of the head is an accurate depiction of how i feel when im in my creative flow. During the project I experienced a lot of hyper activty in my head. I had a hard time sleeping, keeping healthy rutines and eating regurlary.
In an attempt so make the avatar more flowy and soft I added feathers, they did not translate well into the game engine and due to lack of time o could not rigg all of them sepperatly so when wearing them on the avatar they feelt more like spikes, i later enhanced this and made it more into a armour or blades of sort.
The most amazing thing today was when we could actually practise synchronised on the same pole across two countries. I feel like wow how amazing is not this? On Thursday I couldn't sleep until 5 am because I was so hyper after trying out poles in VR for the first time. Now I've done it 3 days in a row.
A week has gone by without me remembering to take notes. It's bad behaviour, but I've also been spiralling down again
I'm not a person that wears high heels a lot in my everyday life. Its still something that made the avatar feel more like me when i added it. It gave me a sense of the accurate hight. empowerment. I wonder how much of this is just socialized subcounsious assosiations but regardless it was an important turning point and something that made the avatar feel complete to me.
Hesitation and silent agreement on respecting space. It feels like if we trespass the presence of the bodies will fade
Creating the seekers was a big shift when i was getting obsessed with having my own cult. It provided a shift in which instead of beeing self centered i think it also allowed me to see myself from an outside perspective and reflect on myself as someone else. I set the intentions to worshipp myself as a god or a spirit guide an din its most magic crystalized fantasy form it served as a hyper version of love yourself and slef care. I feel like it made a shift in my relationship to my body.
How was it different looking at myself as a 3d scan compared to looking at myself from my FP perspective or in the mirror.
during the project I documented my body more obsessively in the start when I was feeling more anxious about my body and now when I feel better about my body I don't take as much irl footage of it.
This 3D scan i made of my body i was also still covering it up and hiding. I had been alone fore quite some time and was having a very fluctuating relation with my body. The double thats uppside down is my normal representation and the one emerging from the snake under feelt like how im starting to break free from my wiev of my own body.
MySpace, my bubble of comfort, collected items from my childhood, a blanket, a portal Heaven's gate. My bed, my fragmented body , my avatar or god or spirit warrior
You wake up and your legs are short and lumpy,covered in cotton candy glimmering skin with rough spots. Blisters or scars maybe. It's tinted in velvet blue, your leg hair is crystal straws that slowly sways with your movement. Your legs are shorter than you thought they would be. You sit down and you wiggle them , like a kid, it feels fun. You like being here.
I can't really tell if it's like I envisioned it but it's definitely something that I think resonates with me, it feels very much like nature, chaos , spirituality as well as technology.
In a world without mirrors you find yourself exploring your new body in a new way. You sit and relax,
You feel like you're in the way, too much perhaps, or too little; all the time. You're at the bottom of the world now. The deep sea. Everything is different now.
The snake scales that wrapped the pole and audience was making a form to symbolise singularity, which can refere to dynamic systems in which small changes can have a big impact or the technological singularity in which technology like ai is advancing and taking over in a inreversible state. A portal in the sky in whicheverything gets sucked up in symbolise the portal to heaven , its not visible but the texture on it is a ai generated texture of angels screaming.
when it's dark too it looks so neat with the glowing ribbons! After the session today i feel so happy, excited, it was so fun exploring and moving. A bit inconvenient when the rigging was a bit broken,
I was feeling so amazing in this avatar, dancing and moving around having everything flow around me, I just loved my new body. I didn't notice any uncomfortable feelings when getting out of vr, i spent 4 h today just moving around, figuring out what i liked or not
The snake moves around the dancers cerving as a shield of protection, we also put up a invissible protection so that people could not come in and interfear in the space we where dancing which is something that made me feel very safe. I was almost unaware of the audience while dancing.
when I'm in VR I forget about that for a while, I get to dance and enjoy myself, I feel excited and learning
the round circle in the face is both a symbol of asexuality and reminds me of a crown or something ethereial. If anything I wish that my avatar would have been at a larger scale during the performance to have a better god like effect.
Another strong symbol thats been reccuring is the bubble, ive found other artist also talking about the bubble and i think its such a good metafor for the artistic state, the emotinal state of artists and the creative process. Its so brittel and soaring, its like magic untill a disturbance from the outsides touches it and it all collapses.
You calm your nerve endings down. You look again, now it's neutral. You breathe. You go out to dinner, it's uncomfortable, you over share. You look in the mirror, now it's all wrong again. Just a couple of h have passed. Nothing has literally changed , it's just your perception. Fluctuating, Flickering, swaying back and forth over a border of self worth.
During the project ive written many short storys and poems and many of them uses the bubbe as a reflection of my state of beeing or this creative bubble ive been in.
I also incorporated bubbles in the music and in the vfx. The asociations also draws me to the ocean, how water and ocean have played a big roll in inspiration and heeling for me.
I had a reflection regarding my body, how I feel about it can change a lot in fast intervals but how I feel in VR is almost always the same, I always feel that it's interesting, fun and weird at the same time.
I’m not interested in dancing in my old avatars, they are not interesting to me anymore because they don't add anything to my movement of my body, if anything they make a less representation to the movies i'm actually doing
I feel amazing in my body, I have no need for body checking, i feel my body is strong whole and vibrating. I feel this is genuinely the happiest I've been in a long while.
I think it helps that I have my mirror covered so that I don't see myself through it when I get out of the vr, it keeps the feeling of how my vr body is with me longer.
Actually it's not so much about how it looks, it's more how it moves. The body , the avatar's body, my body, me
I really liked my avatar so much. I was watching it before from afar and wanted to approach it and hold it. Is it my baby? Lover ? who knows
As I was walking down the street I got a visual in my head that I was my avatar, with high heels and long swaying body, and I walked with self confidence
The Snake or the Oboros got added quite late but feelt like an important detail, not only am i born the year of the snake but it also symbolises rebirth in many cultures which i thought was very fitting of how i feelt during the experience. I feelt like i was experiencing a rebirth of my self as a person and artist at this time
The out of body wiev of my avatar while watching the recorded material sparked a fashination, I enjoyed experiencing my avatar trough the outside wiev, to see how other saw me.
The first person view of myself while dancing does not entierly read as a body, more a abstract cloud with lightning striking out of my body, flowing like a seacreature almost. Its a calming feeling to sway and see how the body responds. I encounter myslef.
It is nice to dance by yourself in VR but its something magical that happens when you encounter another person. Beeing close in vr really did trigger the same feelings of beeing close to someone in real life.
The sensation is different. slightly lighter but more intense. Its in the expectation of physical encounter rather than the physical inpact of an encounter.
During the performance the vfx and lightning also changed the perception of the avatar which i dident experience so much while beeing in the avatar and dancing as it made an impact on me while watching the material afterwards. Especially the dark scenes with the sparks emitting from the body made me feel like i was an etherial beeing or a spirit. the sparks was almost as breaths or burst of emotions.
I noticed that the best feeling or moments of the performance was when I joined r00t down on the floor in the end, we curled up in a bundle and got our fences close, it felt really nice. Quite intimate like two besties snuggling up at a sleepover talking about deep secrets .That's the feeling I got, it was the best part of the performance.
