116 Reviews
proximate comparisons; each of the multimedia
presentations has a unique form of information retrieval
and presentation. The table shows how the four projects
overcome specific problems inherent in traditional
media, and yet use traditional media to make their case.
Finally, the table specifies the interactivity of each project.
Tables Four and Five extend the information offered in
Table One. Here we see how the projects were financed,
published and distributed. These tables suggest the
particular problems facing new technology: publics have
to be educated to consume and use them, and publishers
have to be willing to invest in the possibilities they
represent. The addresses of the distributors are included.
SUMMARY
This review suggests that each of these multimedia
presentations offers new ways of doing visual research.
The range of projects is huge: some have a relatively
modest scope, and others are almost unimaginably
complex, expensive and innovative. In all cases, these
projects draw upon traditional media and extend their
possibilities. The review hopes to make the argument that
multimedia may usefully extend traditional visual
methods, but that these projects are costly, demand
highly specialized knowledge and skills, and require
teamwork that extends from planning to project
execution to distribution.
Avatara
by Donato Mancini, Flick Harrison and Jeremy Turner
Vancouver: 536, 2003, DVD. 72 minutes
Produced and distributed by 536, 536 east 20th
Avenue, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V5V 1M8 Can$20
Review by Maximilian Forte, University College of
Cape Breton
William Gibson, a Vancouver-based novelist, who coined
the term cyberspace in his 1984 novel Neuromancer,
envisioned a set of virtual communities where interaction
takes place through computers as a sort of consensual
hallucination revolving around a graphic representation
of data abstracted from the computers of millions of
users. The notion of the avatar came into play in the
1992 novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson who
envisioned fictional, graphic representations of
individuals in cyberspace. In comes a new film, perhaps a
new ethnographic film genre, bearing witness to and
bringing to life the worlds envisioned by both Gibson
and Stephenson.
Kalki, represented by an animated, talking, purple horse
head, introduces us to the world of Traveler by
interviewing a rather articulate, blinking bunny head
which also lip-syncs words spoken by an actual person.
The bunny head, the avatar of a member of this
computer-mediated association of chatters, is suspended
in front of Kalki, against a backdrop of rotating stars and
colourful geometric shapes forming a surreal landscape,

the two avatars appearing to converse in the same place,
while their human users are separated by thousands of
miles.
This is Avatara, a newly released film on DVD by 536, a
Vancouver-based international artists’ collective that
mounts exhibitions in both online and offline
environments. The documentary will be of especial
interest to those engaged in teaching and research at the
intersection between visual analysis and new forms of
sociability involving computer-mediated communication
on the Internet. Indeed, as there is no other film shot
completely ‘in world’, not only is this an invaluable
teaching resource, but also a priceless ethnographic
document of a sensually stimulating online community
that has been in existence for most of the past 10 years.
Donato Mancini, Flick Harrison and Jeremy Turner, the
makers of Avatara, explain that it is ‘not a cartoon’.
Indeed it is a feature-length documentary of a
community embedded in an online, three-dimensional,
voice chat program called ‘Digitalspace Traveler’ (see
www.digitalspace.com/traveler/). Through 14 interviews
with 18 members, the film-makers cover distinct chapters
that can be viewed separately or as one connected stream.
The chapters appear under the titles of Introduction,
Community, Identity, Art, Wars and Loss. In the process,
‘life on the screen’ (Turkle 1995) is actually shown on the
screen.
What is also striking about this film is that it was not
undertaken by academy-based social scientists, but by
independent artists, who in turn conceive their product
as something between a documentary and an installation
piece. Jeremy Turner is an interdisciplinary artist, music
composer, curator and art critic based in Vancouver,
Canada. Turner explores many digital media, focusing
especially on avatars, bots and singular audio
compositions. Turner encountered Traveler around 2001
and introduced it to his colleagues, Mancini and
Harrison, also based in Vancouver. Harrison is himself
an active and recognized videographer, while Mancini is
a prolific writer of essays on music history, (visual and
textual) poetry, and is an experienced interviewer.
The film-makers’ original intention was to produce a
film about Traveler that focused more on the philosophy
of being and existential issues as they relate to social life
and identity in cyberspace, and these still do figure as
prominent themes in the film. Indeed, a trailer to the film
consists of a filmed, online interview with Pravin Pillay in
Traveler, Pillay seen as zebra-striped sea horse floating in
a blue sky over majestic snow-capped mountains. Pillay
Reviews 117
engages in a stream of philosophical musings over reality,
questions of life, soul, meaning, duality of self and binary
oppositions. The scene accentuates the film’s mode of
portraying Traveler as a voyage through a mental
topography; an exploration of the landscapes of the
imaginary, inhabited by the creative projections of one’s
self. As a result, the film would not only be useful for
teaching in anthropology and sociology courses,
undergraduate and advanced, but in a variety of other
disciplines as well, such as media studies, philosophy and
art history.
Mancini explained to me that as the project evolved, he
and his partners realized that the most fruitful approach
would be simply to document the community, knowing
that Traveler could disappear within a few years – in
these terms, a virtual reinvention of Boasian ‘salvage
ethnography’. Turner spent about six months becoming
acquainted with the regular members of Traveler, in what
was an admittedly difficult process of gaining trust, or
building rapport as ethnographic fieldworkers would
phrase it. Mancini also explained to me the many
motivating factors that led to the making of this film, and
it is worthwhile to quote his words at length, given the
significance of this project:
Our affection for the software (we LOVE the
surreal, and strangely antiquated aesthetic of
Traveler), our knowledge [that] the
community of Traveler is of some historic
importance and, not to sound overbearing,
that it would be a small loss to humankind if
there was no good record of the people, the
place, and the software. No one else was going
to do it, so we had to. We knew also that
nothing like what we had in mind had been
done before, and that a film made entirely
‘in-world’ would be absorbingly beautiful. To
me it’s like looking at ghosts moving around
in an aquarium. Some viewers have actually
been unable to watch it for the quietly
screaming undertone of loneliness one can
detect in some of the interviews.
Loneliness, remedied through the development of online
sociability, is indeed one of the recurring themes in the
statements of the main interviewees in the film. One
member explained that even the level of medication for
his anxiety disorder had been reduced by his doctor as a
result of the positive effects of his participation in this
online community. Another interviewee commented,
‘there are qualities in many of these people that are
admirable … because of the people, that’s why we’re
here’, dispelling the notion that Traveler is a mere game
118 Reviews
played by the bored. Indeed, as one member stated,
‘they’re not just avatars, that’s people I know, and I
love’ em’.
Transcending the confines and limitations of one’s
earthly existence is another of the documentary’s
recurring themes, as phrased by one of Traveler’s
members: ‘in here there is no death, no physical pain, no
injury, no hunger’. In extreme cases, participation in this
online world sometimes has a direct physical correlation
with members’ physical lives in their offline settings, with
several admitting to having remained logged into
Traveler for days on end, for going without sleep for
almost three days, or simply forgetting to eat.
Disembodied physical individualities, reinvented online
through individually reworked avatars, interacting,
almost fusing with other members, are ubiquitous
features of this film. One member even describes
Traveler as a ‘collective intellect’, another calling it ‘a
Mecca for minds’. A conception of community is
strongly held by the interviewed members as well,
pointing to community rituals performed within
Traveler, i.e. soccer games, drag racing, dancing,
weddings and even memorial services. Indeed, Traveler
even boasts of an in-house chapel with a regular lay
cleric who leads those attending services in prayer and
discussion of passages in the Bible. As with everything
else, the chapel is graphically represented as such,
where members can move in three dimensions, occupy
pews and listen to the sermons delivered by ‘Steve’,
located in Queensland, Australia, and represented by a
hovering zebra-striped sea horse avatar.
Possibly one of the more comical moments in the
film – yet instructive as to the creation of rules and
collective norm construction – has to do with ‘avatar
wars’. These conflicts consist of largely disruptive and
anti-social behaviour, such as ‘bonking’ another avatar
by deliberately bumping into it (this interrupted one of
the interviews in fact), or creating such gigantic avatars
that they easily occupy an entire room. Wars, in the sense
described by the informants, involved hacking into
servers hosting various rooms, and some of the server
owners and room creators attest to having nightmares of
imminent hacker activities.
Avatara is a virtual ethnographic film shot online. As
with many other virtual ethnographies, it has its peculiar
advantages and shortcomings. The viewer’s audio-visual
participation in Traveler is clearly a very engaging feature
of this film. The nature of Traveler, animated, three-
dimensional, with all communication conducted over
microphones, allows for a more dynamic ethnographic
film than would have otherwise been possible with text-
based chat. The ‘everydayness’ of the individuals
interviewed lends the film a certain degree of credibility.
The film quality is itself beyond reproach, with camera
angles chosen with obvious care, often showing the
interviewer rotating around a room as he shifted from
one informant to another, with other members hovering
nearby and listening to the interview. A few of the online
social events are also filmed, such as the dances or the
drag races.
Amongst the shortcomings of the film, from an
ethnographic vantage point, is that there is little
information within the film itself about how
informants were selected and whether or not they form
a representative sample of the online community. ‘Off
camera’, Mancini explained to me that in fact the
‘stars’ of Traveler were chosen as the key informants,
that is the regular, most tenacious participants. While
viewing the film, I often found myself wondering if
there was too much of a motivated thematic selectivity,
that is, if themes of affectivity and collectivity had not
been overemphasized. Perhaps another shortcoming of
this, as with other virtual ethnographies, is that the
information is gathered completely ‘in-world’. An even
more compelling documentary, and one that would be
significantly more difficult to mount (not to mention
costly and with knotted issues of confidentiality),
would be one such as this yet coupled with some
offline documentation of Traveler’s members’ lives,
perhaps accompanying them as they go online,
interviewing them offline as they participate online. At
times I was left wishing for less narration, and less of
the formal interview style that dominates the film, in
favour of simply witnessing regular activities and
hearing members converse with each other, a degree of
‘lived reality’ that seems to be sorely lacking in the
film.
Nevertheless, Avatara is richly textured documentary
that currently makes an unrivalled and highly innovative
contribution to the field of digital visual research, as
critical to teaching and research in the wider field of
Cyber studies as any of the more prominent Cyberpunk
novels or edited collections of papers on virtual
communities and cybercultures, and certainly a necessary
complement to all of these resources.
REFERENCE
Turkle, S. 1995. Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the
Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.