In Vedic myth, the gods speak to us lowly fleshy humans through the mediation of avatars. An avatar is a temporary container for the essence of divinity...the clothing of an identity, the only way our poor neurons can apprehend the burning holiness of deities.
In cyberculture, an avatar is also a temporary identity. Used for both gaming and chat interaction, the avatar is an imaginary sheath for the user, a role that the user takes on, sometimes becoming embued with adolescent wish-fulfillment (how many skinny computer geeks propose avatars that are Teutonic warriors?), sometimes rife with pranksterism (the avatar can transcend the gender of the user, can subvert the user's identity...a man can be a woman or a little girl, a little girl can become a dominatrix or a goddess, a woman can become a warrior-prince or a fireman...).
Stefano Marotta and Roberto Russo, two Italian net artists, have created a site that uses the avatar as a mode of engagement with the user. The Avatar Project (http://rhizome.org/artbase/3910/Sito_Avatar_Project/index.html), part of Rhizome.org's ArtBase, is a highly poetic digital environment...which is to be expected, when the subject of digital meditation is the fiction of the avatar.
According to the project's prospectus, The Avatar Project "is about a co-ordinate series of digital works: panels, animations and web art. The main character of the project is an avatar whose name is Lexus, a humanoid alter ego worked out at the computer with tridimensional modelling techniques. As digital objectification of the consciences, Lexus proposes herself, even in this project of Web Art, as the 'triumphant' face of the medial contemporaneity. Through her, in the narrative weaving of the elements, we intend to investigate the psycho-perceptive borders and the mutations burden, even the ambiguous ones, induced by the contemporary Digital Lifestyle."
Note the use of the word "narrative." The Avatar Project is, essentially, narrative, though that narrative is highly poeticized, and resembles in no way the traditional Aristotlian narrative we recognize as the stock of television and feature films. In fact, this piece reminds me quite a bit of Dante's Divine Comedy, with the humanoid Lexus serving as both Virgil and at times Dante. But this is only a tracing of a theme; the project is not nearly so simple as to follow such a linear (albeit richly evocative) path.
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