[...] Helen: Avatars play an important role in your work by activating the sound. And yet you have “core problems” with them. “The avatar concept”, you say in July’s empyre discussion “is the one I find the most troubling, and it also grows from the 3d-space-as-physical-simulation misassumption. There is no need to concentrate presence into one cohesive point (an avatar).” I wonder if you would explain what you mean by this, and perhaps suggest alternatives.

Adam: Well, if avatars play an important role in my work, it’s because they play a very important role in Second Life itself. The problems I refer to are both technical and conceptual. First, the analogy of a single point of presence, from which the rest of the world is perceived, and in which the rest of the world perceives you, arises directly from our physical world, where our sensory organs are coalesced in a single unit and cannot be separated. Recently, humans have been able to spread out perception and presence through technological mediation, for example cameras, telephones, radio and the internet, and I think we are certainly slowly moving away from the concept of a single point of perception and presence, but mostly it is still how we negotiate our physical existence…” Continue reading Interview: Adam Nash by Helen Thorington, Networked Music Review.