Digi Me

This week the phrase “digital avatars” has kept making me think of Digimon. I don’t think Digimon ever really established what exactly happened to these kids when they entered the DigiWorld. Was their meatbody converted to bits and code? They pass back and forth between the barrier several times, which to me seems like a painful transition.

I worked with Nico and Kim doing 3D body scans with itSeez3D. We did a lot of scans. None of them were perfect but I got fatigued doing them and just settled on one that at least had the body mesh structure right even if it was missing some textures. It was pretty frustrating. I tried to take the structure sensor home for my partner and I to scan each other but we didn’t have enough room in our apartment to do the scans well. Obj file and textures here

Our readings for class this week were on courtroom trials deciding on the rights to use various types of celebrities' images and likenesses. Some of these legal arguments were hard to follow on first reading. But I finished wondering what rights do I have to my likeness as a non-celebrity not living in California? Will our cultural discourse of the future be cluttered with the dead figures of today? Is there a fatigue point? At what point does Elvis fade from cultural consciousness if Digivis leads the rockabilly revival of 2250?