Embodied Research Through Avatars: Understanding Avatar-Making as Self-Making Through Mixed-Reality Embodiment

• In Event: Embodied Epistemologies and Methodologies in the Digital/New Media Curriculum

Abstract

1. Objectives:
Avatars are virtual forms that people use to participate in online virtual worlds, which through digital pixels often simulate embodied physical worlds. Moreover, avatars are embodied identities through which people communicate with themselves and others in either simulated places they desire to visit or richly imaginative spaces possible in virtual worlds.
While avatars are virtual constructions, performing with an avatar creates affective embodied experiences. In this presentation of my dissertation research on how identity is projected and/or transformed through avatar construction (author, 2011),

I present a mixed-reality research methodology in which I, as the researcher, used my avatar as a device to explore the relationship between avatar-making and self-making. I created two avatars to generate conversations between an avatar that I identified as me the researcher and a fictional avatar with a distinct personality and history.

2. Theoretical Framework
Creating avatars in virtual worlds is a teaching strategy to reveal self-referential organization. A self-referential educative process involves critical self-knowledge and self-creation from networked associative organization of self in relation to the world (Keifer-Boyd, in press). It is this understanding (and potentialities) of self-referential organization that connects researchers’ avatars to their researched worlds.

3. Methods
Based on the concepts of participant observation (Kendell, 1999) and autoethnography (Ellis, 2004), a mixed reality research methodology also draws on an arts-based method of using fictional narratives as an interpretative strategy (Arrows, 2008). The methodology produces fictional conversation, which integrates observations of the participants with the researchers’ self-referential knowledge. Thus, the avatars’ fictional dialogue about the interview data that the researcher avatar gathered from study participants in virtual and physical worlds is a mixed-reality arts-based methodology.

4. Data Sources
The researcher’s embodiment in the avatar form constitutes a response to how new media embodies identities and how avatars create, express, and embody affective self-making and sensory self-knowing. Avatars provide researchers with a way to “walk” through the virtual land and feel the virtual weather. This bodily understanding of experience as avatar and in virtual worlds is essential to understanding how virtual and physical spaces and identities have intertwined in embodied ways in contemporary times.

5. Result
The mixed reality methodology yielded results that both captured a range of avatar-making experiences and provided a basis for an in-depth understanding of those experiences. Most importantly, a mixed reality methodology situations the researcher in an experiential relationship with research participants through two avatars’ differently embodied participation in the virtual world (Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, & Taylor, 2012).

6. Significance:
The methodology provided opportunities for interpreting the research data through multiple perspectives because of the integration of the conversations between the researcher’s two avatars. In this presentation on embodied research through avatars, I perform and discuss a mixed reality methodology to open and extend in new directions dialogue on research methodologies of narrative inquiry, autoethnography, and arts-based, as well as methods of observation and interview.

Authors

• Christine Liao, University of North Carolina - Wilmington

• Karen Keifer-Boyd