The Avatar and the Self (2023) was my first master’s thesis project, written during my studies at PXL-MAD School of Arts. Looking back, it’s a work that feels both distant and foundational, something I no longer fully stand behind, but which marked an important starting point in my research practice. It was the project that first pushed me to take questions of digital identity seriously, and to explore how avatars, these strange, hybrid entities, shape and reflect who we are.
At the time, I was drawn to the avatar as a site of tension: a digital double that can simultaneously extend, distort, and conceal the self. I approached it through case studies, theory, and visual experiments, trying to understand what it means to be represented by something else, something you made, something you control, but something that is also not you. My references were broad: Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, object-oriented ontology, avatar phenomenology. I was reaching, sometimes awkwardly, toward a vocabulary that could hold the complexity of digital embodiment.
In retrospect, the work is shaped by the limits of that moment. Still, it remains a valuable document for me, a record of how I began thinking through digital subjectivity, and of the questions that have stayed with me since: What does it mean to become something else? Where does the self begin and end in virtual space? And how do our tools shape the way we understand who we are?
The final outcome was a video essay made with avatars I designed throughout the year, reflecting on identity, performance, and the shifting boundaries between subject and object. It may no longer represent where I am now, but it holds the trace of where I began.