Avatars, Alter Egos, and Ventriloquists’ Dummies: Voice and Vicariousness Online

My section of the digital book consists of two long essays and five shorter accounts of related pieces of my Ego Media research which the essays refer to.

These essays draw out key themes that have run through this research, charting developments in digital culture and breaking my findings down into a series of propositions.

The first essay, The Networked Voice, looks at how digital technologies are changing our understanding of the voice and its relationship to identity.

The second essay, Auto/biographical Avatars, considers the role of proxy bodies in online self-presentation.

In addressing these overlapping themes, both essays consider forms of identity work where self-expression shades into role-play, ventriloquism, or mimicry. They show how, by making it easier to borrow others’ bodies and voices, digital technologies are underlining the extent to which selfhood is and always has been relational and performative – while also giving rise to troubling new forms of forms of alienation, exploitation, commodification, and capture.

These pages – housed in the project archive on the King’s College London website – provide the contexts out of which the essays developed. They highlight the specific texts, communities, individuals, and phenomena on which my exploration of these broader themes has focused, while showcasing the range of digital outputs my research has generated.

"Exploring ASMR Culture" summarizes my research into autonomous sensory meridian response, a mysterious tingling sensation that some web users seek to trigger as a means of managing stress and sleeplessness.¹ This account incorporates a podcast I produced in collaboration with two “ASMRtists” who post tingle-inducing videos to YouTube. While the ASMR community might seem like an obscure subcultural niche, I argue that it has much to teach us about conceptions of embodiment, identity, and intimacy in digital culture.

"Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity" supplements my published work on gaming culture, offering critical summaries of fifteen videogames.² Ranging from desktop simulators to dick-pic-studios, allegorical puzzle-platformers to interactive collages, these titles show how game designers are exploring the nature of networked identity and pioneering new forms of interactive life writing.

"Grime and Gaming" gives an account of how grime musicians have engaged with videogames and of what this engagement can tell us about digital selfhood.³ The piece features a map highlighting the diasporic connections and glocal cultural flows that undergird grime’s love affair with gaming.

"Animating Sight and Song" was a research-creation collaborating with Ana Parejo Vadillo to produce a digital edition of a poem by Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), who published together under the pen name Michael Field.⁴ The couple’s 1892 volume Sight and Song saw them enlisting figures from Renaissance art as muses and mouthpieces – a strategy that we argue anticipates the forms of auto/biographical avatar play favored by contemporary social media users. The piece showcases a number of GIF animations created to illustrate our edition of the poem.

"Moving Past Present" describes another practice-based research project that, like “Animating Sight and Song,” aimed to shed light on contemporary digital culture by looking back to an earlier phase in media history.⁵ Here I worked with artist Janina Lange, who created a pop-up motion capture studio where 1890s Gaiety Theatre stars Constance Collier and Ellaline Terriss were “reanimated” using Kinect gaming hardware. Looking back to the start of the last century, we aimed to highlight the terms on which media technologies render gendered bodies legible and saleable today.