Prospective and retrospective reflections on avatars and virtual actors in artistic experimental exploration

Two researchers and artists in the Art and Technology of the Image sat down twice with the co-editors of this issue of Hybrid to explore the stakes involved regarding virtual actors and avatars based on their respective experiences in the university laboratory (INREV-AIAC at Paris 8) and with a digital art festival (Laval Virtual/Recto VRso). The first interview grapples with the dynamic that exists between art and science as it pertains to virtual protagonists in terms of their current and retrospective trajectories. While discussing avatars and virtual actors, they share their analysis regarding their expressivity, their sensitive and thoughtful natures, their human likeness, their imperfections, the empathy they illicit and how they externalise and integrate human skills. From this, the journey from the spectator’s real body to a virtual one, through avatarisation, becomes visible. In this way, their humanisation can be addressed and contrasted with our artificialisation and the emergence of a virtual co-species. The second interview is more informal, which creates a context whereby types of hybridation can be reformulated. The researchers and designers discuss the scope of artistic and creative exploration in the metaverse through avatars with the objective of being prospective in light of several issues: plural or singular identities and anticipating how behaviour and hybridisations evolve. At the heart of the debate lies the function of art and artists, between freedom and constraint, appropriation and subversion, the creation of singular worlds, referred to as “singularverses,” or the simple occupation of non-artistic spaces to test the possibilities of living together better with or through virtual creatures. virtual actors, interactive avatars, hybridisation, research and creation, technological experiments, virtual exhibition, metaverse