TOXIC GARDEN — DANCE DANCE DANCE

recording of live performance inside Roblox on December 9 2022, color, sound, 9’ 59”, Italy

Created by Kamilia Kard

Toxic Garden - DANCE DANCE DANCE is an online participatory performance created within Toxic Garden, a unique map designed by the artist for Roblox (Roblox Corporation, 2006) in which participants can perform a common dance by donning custom skins that change randomly. A visual commentary on toxic human behaviors, DANCE DANCE DANCE is inspired by the defense mechanisms of poisonous plants. Its development took place during the residency at Lavanderia a Vapore and it involved dancers who contributed in the creation of the choreography. Designed and developed by Kamilia Kard, aka KKlovesU4E. Soundtrack of the performance by Rafael Bresciani. Sound design of Toxic Garden’s map by Cristina Katja Angeloro.

Kamilia Kard is an artist and scholar based in Milan. Her research explores how hyper-connectivity and new forms of online communication have modified and influenced the perception of the human body, as well as our gestures, feelings and emotions. Her practice spans from digital paintings to websites, from video installations to 3D printed sculptures, from interactive virtual environments and video games to AR facial filters. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, public spaces and online venues. Highlights include: A.dition Gallery, South Korea (2022), Careof, Milan (2021); Marséll, Milan (2021); Museo Pino Pascali, Polignano a Mare (2021); Milan Machinima Festival (2021); Galerie Odile Ouizeman, Paris (2020); Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris (2020); Dimora Artica, Milan (2020); Olomouc Museum of Art (2020); Metronom, Modena (2018, 2019 and 2020); EP7, Paris (2019); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2018); iMAL, Brussels (2018); Digitalive @ REF, Rome (2018); Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2017); Triennale di Milano (2017); Centro Cultural São Paulo (2017); La Quadriennale di Roma (2016); Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2015); Hypersalon, Miami (2015); The Wrong Biennial, online (2014); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2013). She is the author of Arte e Social Media. Generatori di sentimenti (Postmedia Books 2022) and the editor of Alpha Plus. An Anthology of Digital Art (Editorial Vortex 2017). She often lectures about her artistic practice and research. She has a Ph.D in Digital Humanities (University of Genova), and she teaches Multimedia Communication and Aesthetics of New Media at Accademia di Brera in Milan, Italy.

 

 

Gemma Fantacci: Can you describe the genesis of Toxic Garden? Why did you select Roblox for your performance DANCE DANCE DANCE?

Kamilia Kard: Toxic Garden originated from a series of considerations I made regarding different kinds of relationships born or developed online. The internet is a place where people can experience the self on several levels and moreover, it is quite easy to be manipulated or to be subjected to manipulative behaviors. For instance, artist Cao Fei once explained in an interview that while researching for one of her projects in Second Life, she noticed that people concealed or mediated by an avatar changed their attitude, became more aggressive at times, and less conditioned by social conventions. This happens more frequently with avatars that do not aesthetically represent our real identity, i.e. with fantasy avatars. The creation of an avatar is a fundamental step for a user who constantly socialize in online environments, such as Second Life or Roblox on a daily basis.

I started to play with Roblox more assiduously during the pandemic and the lockdown. I began to study the game. I quickly realized that behind the façade of a video game development platform, lies a very popular space for communication and the development of interpersonal relationships. Used mostly by teenagers and pre-teens, Roblox is an important tool of self-expression for a generation that — in most cases — is still unclear about its own identity. During my research, I observed a group of pre-adolescents struggling to find the right outfit, the right slang, the right maps, the right subcultures. The latter became a container for many aesthetic and behavioral elements of their avatar, with important consequences on the gaming experience. I paid special attention to the negative consequences of these episodes, noting how difficult relationships could become toxic to the extent that players would leave the map, or even the server. Extending my reflection to non-online interpersonal relationships, I thought of toxic relationships as a series of poisonous plants that make up a garden. Despite having toxic properties, many of the plants I chose are common and often are grown for decorative purposes. The poisonous plant becomes a metaphor for a human behavior that in many cases is latent and only comes out when we feel attacked, in other cases it is an actual means of pursuing one’s own ends in a toxic way.

These reflections, combined with my investigations about Roblox, prompted me to choose it as the prime platform for the construction of my virtual environment Toxic Garden, in which poisonous plants become the main subject, aestheticized and highlighted of the game map I developed.

The participatory performance Dance Dance Dance, that takes place in a sub-map of Toxic Garden, is named after the novel of the same name by Haruki Murakami, in which dancing is the only possible action to follow the ineluctable flow of time that drags human beings along. «You gotta dance. As long as the music plays. You gotta dance. Don’t even think why. Start to think, your feet stop. Your feet stop, we get stuck. We get stuck, you’re stuck». As in life, in Murakami’s text and in the choreography of the performance, the cycle of “dance” brings out issues related to interpersonal relationships, which are sometimes complicated. Human relationships are accompanied by feelings and sensations that cannot always be controlled; however one must deal with them without ever stopping “dancing”.

Gemma Fantacci: When I access the map you created in Roblox, my avatar sheds its formerly chosen skin and wears one that changes randomly. In addition to this, all participants join in a connected dance to the rhythm of music. Would you tell us how these two elements tie into the project?

Kamilia Kard: When the user enters the metaverse I developed, they temporarily abandons the customisation of their avatar to take on that of one of the seven poisonous plants I modeled: hemlock, castor-oil plant, belladonna, common yew, purple foxglove, lily of the valley and stramonium, a form of vegetalisation of the representation of our digital selves. A combination of human, plant organisms and digital representation. Human nature comes out texturally when we open the dance menu, in which we find a series of dance steps each corresponding to an emotion, attitude or state of mind. Assuming that dance is always an emotion, the choice to deal with emotions in such an analytical manner came about during my residency period at the Lavanderia a Vapore in Collegno. During those days, I worked with four dancers from the Balletto Teatro di Torino and Fondazione Egri (Federica Rignanese, Francesca Picca Piccon, Aurora Mecca and Giada Zilio) and together we created the dance steps that make up the choreography of the performance.

After a brief introduction to the intentions of Toxic Garden, the girls immediately got in touch with the project, reasoning and extrapolating what can be defined as the repetitions of behavior and emotions experienced during involvement — active and passive — in a manipulative or toxic relationship. Reflecting on behavioral patterns, pivotal words emerged that in turn became triggers for the composition of each dance step. The choreography is the reasoned set of these steps, which form a narrative about the several genres of manipulative relationships. We have identified three phases: the first coincides with a moment of high involvement with the person exercising his or her position of power, which makes the person experiencing it feel over the moon, very open and positive; then comes the “blow” phase, where from the perceived state of exclusivity one falls into an abyss of disorientation, new perceptions, insecurity and more; finally, it closes with the phase of awareness and restart.

These three phases thus became the basis for a “story”, which we translated into the following script, which forms the background for the first part of the Dance Dance Dance choreography:

Encounter -> seduction -> play-> persuasion -> giving -> lightheartedness -> building confidence -> confidence-> up (clouds) -> up (jumps) -> hitting -> being hit-> disorientation -> no listening -> mask -> manipulation -> new confidence -> pressure -> no gravity -> hitting -. > being hit -> action-reaction -> shield -> give and take -> animal-bullet -> immobility -> tapis roulant -> return -> give and take -> oppression-> insecurity-> realisation -> shield -> help -> take and escape -> confidence -> no gravity -> escape path -> restart. 

The second part of the choreography tells a much shorter story, because those who live it have treasured past experiences. This is the script:

Memory -> play -> up (clouds) -> give and take -> confidence -> down (hits) -> shield-> tapis roulant-> up (jumps) -> realisation-> down (resignation) -> immobility -> escape path -> stop -> Joy.

All these steps were captured with the camera and then processed by an artificial intelligence that turned them into 3D animations. To be successful in capturing the videos, the dancers had to move within a specific area, avoid certain movements, and be dressed in a specific way that helped the machine’s eye to read their movements more fluently. One of the positive feedback I got from the four dancers, which I think is interesting to share, is that all the limitations imposed by the AI actually gave them the opportunity to test their creativity and authorship. For its part, the artificial intelligence wanted to participate in the choreographic set-up by sometimes providing particular interpretations of individual steps. I sometimes modified these “interpreted” steps to bring them back to their original value, and sometimes I kept them with the machine's license. Once again, it starts from an inspiration that originates from the realm of plants, from poisonous ones, which is translated into a human body and movement subsequently reworked by a program, a natural transition between plants, humans, avatars and artificial intelligence.

Gemma Fantacci: At the end of your artistic residency Residenze Digitali supported by the Romaeuropa Festival and Lavanderia a Vapore – Piemonte dal Vivo, you presented DANCE DANCE DANCE to the public on three consecutive evenings. I was among the audience. After the collective performance, users could explore the map, interact with the props, including flowers that have various behaviors – for instance, when I approached the Belladonna flowers I found myself trapped! – and discover hidden environments such as the labyrinth. What was the audience’s response to the performance? What kind of challenges did you encounter while coordinating multiple people in a space that was potentially new to them? What about trolling?

Kamilia Kard: It was quite a challenge to coordinate all the people in the metaverse using only the chat window of Roblox. Initially, I had not planned to do this: I had imagined that the users would enter the Toxic Garden — Dance Dance Dance map and that, after a few minutes of socializing and greetings, the participatory dance performance would begin, that is the moment of collective experience. When the choreography was over, all avatars were teleported to the Toxic Garden map, as in the typical video game “round system”. Here began the individual experience, in which the avatars could explore the garden, find new places or, as I mentioned before, compose their own choreography using the individual dance steps available in a special menu of the interface.  

However, when I saw the disorientation of some users, especially in the second map, the exploratory one, it came naturally to me to help them by coordinating their experiences and activities. After all, Roblox has a strong communication component that makes it easy to reach all the participants in the experience. Thus, when we were in Toxic Garden, I ran with a group of people to the color-changing puddles, we went to discover hidden places and sub-maps, such as Dance Dark Dancer or the Pink Obsession labyrinth in the foxglove forest. In Dance Dark Dancer, the ‘plant avatar’ is replaced by a dark avatar moving in a completely black environment, within which are the poisonous plants but in a neon pink and wireframe version: they show the skeleton of their 3D geometry. In this world dominated by darkness, the avatar must find his or her own image by exploiting the few light sources offered by the plants’ luminous skeletons, like a search for self in plant primordiality. 

In the Pink Obsession maze, I teleported the user into an all-pink maze, blocking the camera in the subjective view. This forced first-person perspective means that the player can never see their own avatar, while they can see that of the others in the original version, not customized by me. I noticed that people, after getting used to being plants within the previous two worlds, and seeing others as plants, when they crossed paths with a person within the maze, they did not expect to see the avatar of another person: it was like a return to “normality” in terms of representation. Normality is reflected in the encounter with another avatar. 

Also, I did not find much trolling activity in the experiences described above, as well as in the Toxic Garden exploratory map. The individual nature of those experiences did not favor it. In contrast, in the dance performance, the smaller environment and an 'imposed' animation that obliged the avatar to dance for about ten minutes, made some people sought alternative ways of experiencing the performance, such as breaking the patterns of the dance group, jumping on plants and sometimes on other people’s heads, compulsively running around and trying to get noticed as much as possible. While the performance integrated a more mature audience, inclined to performing arts, who participated more calmly and consciously in the collective dance, it also made the younger players unable to stay still in one place for too long, unhinged. In any case, I found their contribution interesting, capable of creating a solid union between different generations, the regular player and the occasional user. 

Gemma Fantacci: Toxic Garden features different plants, ranging from the lily of the valley to the castor bean. What prompted your floral choices? Was it aesthetics or functionality? A mix of the two? Alongside the study of the female body in the Woman as a Temple series, on your Instagram page you also posted other 3D experiments. Flowers, especially roses, are a recurring subject. Often associated with the female figure – especially with the idea of beauty and vulnerability – in Toxic Garden the flower is connoted as something potentially dangerous, e.g., poisonous plants. How would you describe the relationship between the female body and flowers within your ongoing research?

Kamilia Kard: The flowers in Toxic Garden were chosen among some of the most common poisonous plants in Europe. I did not want to focus on the exotic but on the familiar. I also choose plants that can be found in the history of poisons — which is linked to the history of witchcraft, often associated with the female gender — but whose dangerousness would somehow come as a surprise, a hidden insidiousness where one would least expect it. For example, lily of the valley, often used in brides’ bouquets, contains convallatoxin, which in large doses can cause cardiac arrest. Some plants are for decorative use, to beautify gardens for example; others, such as hemlock, grow wild without any special care from humans. Poisonous flowers, in my work, metaphorically symbolize the toxic behavior that people can engage in, either voluntarily or instinctively. These types of behavior, even in small doses, like the common plants I decided to represent, surround us almost daily. My choice originated from an evocative association, while the aesthetic component is a consequence dictated by the nature of the flower and my aptitude for taking care mostly of the visual part of the projects I work on.

Anyway, flowers have always had a consistent presence in my work, starting with the yellow roses and glitter flowers that adorn my website My Love Is So Religious (2016), a project about gossip and jealousy. In 2017, I modeled metallic roses for My Love Is So Religious - Rainbow Dream, a print composition and immersive environment in which they coexist, along with other elements, with my female busts in an icy environment, traces of a journey both real and introspective. If you want to animate a 3D flower, you have to equip it with a skeleton like any human being or animal. Technology makes it “naturally” anthropomorphic. I thought about this when I was asked to propose a work that would challenge the recognition and classification capabilities of machine vision and artificial intelligence for an online exhibition on the Feral File platform. I thought of flesh roses, covered in textures with various flesh tones and small tattoos, and manifesting animal characters and behavior. Two roses approach each other and kiss gently, a third moves nervously and unpredictably, yet another approaches its companions like a curious tadpole. Another one has “daisy” tattooed on a petal. Thus was born A Rose by Any Other Name (2021), a work about the irreducibility of things to the words, or tags, that define them. There were also other projects and, in the end, it all culminated in the floral avatars of Toxic Garden

Gemma Fantacci: Toxic Garden and DANCE DANCE DANCE is discussed in your latest book, Arte e Social Media. Generatori di sentimenti, developed from your Doctoral dissertation in the program of Digital Humanities at the University of Genoa. Specifically, you describe how online communication, constant connectivity, and online sharing practices have changed the way people express and relate to subjectivity, body perception, and the way they convey our feelings and moods to a wider, constantly connected audience comprising both acquaintances and strangers. Your investigation focuses on the modalities of (re)presentation of our persona and body. Can you explain how your research project came about and how it has influenced your artistic practice?

Kamilia Kard: I started my research into online self-representation in 2012 with the Best Wall Cover project (2012-2015). A few months after the introduction of covers on Facebook as a further customisation of accounts, I had noticed that many users were creating interesting compositions with their profile image and cover. The project is an archive that collects screenshots of profile image and cover combinations, collected by me or sent in by other people, on a Tumblr page. With this work, I began to examine social media as the main sites for the continuous experimentation of the self. 

I started observing the transformation of the digital body during my early years of teaching, when I taught 3D modeling courses. Seeing novice students grappling with the modeling and animation of human anatomies gave me the opportunity to reflect on a number of considerations that make up my research on the dysmorphic representation of the human being. Around the same time, I curated the online exhibition Lucky Charms for Dinner, which invited a group of artists to reflect on how the accelerated rhythms we are subjected to, together with hyper connectivity, could have consequences on the perception of the human body. That exhibition was an opportunity to learn more about and explore the work of artists who later became key for my research, such as Kate Durbin with the work Hello Selfie Miami (2015) and Caroline Delieutraz with the SMR video Unboxing + Tapping + Whispering with Rikita (2017). 

In other words, my activities as a lecturer, curator and artist were instrumental in initiating, in a piecemeal way, my PhD research. My thesis was an opportunity to converge all my original observations towards a single theme, enriching them with new research in both theoretical and artistic fields. The research methods of the digital humanities, for example, nurtured my virtual reality project Bit Time Thing (2018), a VR environment created following the linguistic analysis of 50 ASMR video texts. I extrapolated the 30 most frequent nouns (with neutral value according to the Wiki Art Emotions dataset) and reproduced them as objects in the virtual experience. When a person is near the object, a whispering voice — typical of ASMR videos — repeats the word associated with it, in a traditional language game. The aim was to understand how the perception of the pleasant feeling created by the audio of the ASMR videos changes through the interaction when one has to navigate an environment to activate the audio; and how it changes when one is confronted with the three-dimensional representation of the word itself. 

From emotions in immersive virtual reality environments, I then moved on to projects that analyzed more everyday and communicative experiences, culminating in the Toxic Garden project.

Gemma Fantacci: In your book, you discuss a wide variety of artists, from Tianzhuo Chen to Jon Rafman, not to mention the creators of several ASMR videos. What were your criteria in drawing such an intricate map of practices within the contemporary art sphere?

Kamilia Kard: I like the description given by Valentina Tanni in the preface of the book, describing the work of the artists I quote and who fundamentally accompany my reasoning as 'compasses'. The book is divided into two areas: the awareness of an online existence that starts from the idea of the digitized body and self-representation, and that of the experience of one's own emotions and feelings online. To give a few examples, artists such as Jon Rafman have been instrumental in moving away from the traditional idea of the human body in representing people and characters within virtual environments; Simon Senn, Lu Yang and Elisa Giardina Papa have helped me to address the theme of the human body scanned and transformed into a 'habitable shell' by the artist or other people. Caroline Delieutraz played a central role in my analysis of typical web phenomena such as ASMR and unboxing, just as Natalie Bookchin paved the way for some considerations on online performative activities and the spectator transformed into a visualiser. These are just some of the artists in the text and, depending on the different cases, while analyzing their work I focused on their artistic language, at other times on formal issues, and at other times on conceptual aspects. 

Gemma Fantacci: In Arte e Social Media. Generatori di sentimenti you discuss Nicholas Mirzoeff’s research, and specifically his assessments about the selfie as a practice that shows “our own daily performance of ourselves”. You argue that the selfie is not a narcissistic mode of ostentation, but a multi-faceted mode by which users present themselves to varying degrees of “reality”: as they are, as they would like to be or as they would like others to perceive them. However, the self is also “a regulator of emotions to affirm one’s feelings”, as you wrote in your book. Instagram has become increasingly selfie-centric over time, especially with the addition of a feature known as Stories. Many have described it as a toxic environment in which users are constantly making comparisons between themselves and those who share heavily-edited profiles, glamorous lifestyles, and flawless bodies. In 2020, Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau introduced BeReal as an alternative to Instagram. The app allegedly shows “your friends for real”, that is, with no filters and no post-production. BeReal sends a simultaneous notification to registered users every day, at a different time, to capture their daily life and then share the photo in two minute intervals. In fact, this project has turned out to be not so different from Instagram, in that with the latest updates it is possible to delay notifications, giving users time to “prepare for the shot” rather than getting caught “off guard”, so to speak. Why do you think our search for what is true and authentic is eventually eroded by the need to constantly edit our persona? Would you say the urge comes from the users themselves or are they conditioned by social media to favor certain behavioral behaviors?

Kamilia Kard: Our online existence is made up of such a simultaneous multitude of divergent representations that every now and then we feel the need to return this complexity to something known, in this case “the real”. The need to return to the real self — which many times it’s only a temporary phenomenon — promotes the development of applications such as BeReal, new apps like TikTok Now, a standalone application from TikTok, or additional tools within well-known social networks that exploit the same dynamics as BeReal. These experiences of self-representation recall the practice of the early selfie, the same one that, according to Nicholas Mirzoeff, allowed to communicate «our own daily performance of ourself». What distinguishes it is that with BeReal and similar applications, the enactment of the performance of ourselves is mediated, and I would also say, dominated by the time factor. If in 2016 the selfie, for Joan Fontcuberta, validated our presence before a fact, a kind of “I was there” devoid of major digital and aesthetic manipulations, in 2022, with BeReal, this sort of game is composed of three elements: “I”, “here”, “now”. With selfies, the hic et nunc is based on the playful aspect that made this type of application so popular. This fast paced representation manifests itself in its process, as opposed to its permanence online (as it can be for stories), and in the limitation or even absence of “pre-production,” in the immediate input into the stream. 

One thing I have noticed in this wave of “real” faces is that the absence of aesthetic manipulation now triggers a performativity in people’s facial expressions. A search for the grotesque through the humanly possible expressions of the face, an exaggeration towards the meme. Perhaps a form of insecurity dictated by the absence of those retouches that allow users to come closer to their ideal selves. Perhaps a desire to emulate what a facial distortion filter would do to our faces. If we do not have the confidence to look at our best, it is better to appear nice and fresh. 

Sharing one's own image represents a powerful means to emerge from the flat and rigorous framework of several social networks, and at the same time it’s a fertile ground for experimentation and self expression (especially in the younger generations). The possibility of continually changing one’s profile, of being an avatar, a cosplayer, an image downloaded from the Internet, a meme, a memoji, a self-produced image, a 3D render, filtered, deformed face, and much more, generates a plurality of representations that can be defined as an identity package that is constantly changing, at an accelerated pace. Everything passes on people’s profiles, enters the stream, exists for twenty-four hours, becomes a story, a status, an impression. In this temporary evanescence, we are witnessing the sharing of selfie images as enriched temporary self images, augmented by the use of facial filters: an “avatarization” of faces.

Gemma Fantacci: The phrase “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” has been misattributed to Andy Warhol. Nonetheless, such a prediction has come true. The phenomenon of online virality seems to prove it. Influencers have become global stars by producing content with specific features, formats, and frameworks. These dynamics reminded me of the role of NPCs in video games, which are virtual characters programmed (condemned?) to perform a set of actions to enhance the illusion of “immersivity” for the player. In your opinion, does the fact that users shape our actions and the ways in which they present themselves within a given framework – Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and the likes –, and adhere to the logic of the platform make them the NPCs of a media landscape in which the rule of the algorithms is accepted without questioning it? Is it possible to subvert such an environment? 

Kamilia Kard: I think most people passively and consciously accept the surveillance and control of algorithms over our online activities. Although we do not like this condition, to question it would mean giving up our very existence on social media. In the social architecture that Benjamin Bratton describes as a “stack”, people are defined as “users”, a set of traceable data that carry with them agents of an economic, social, etc. nature. The digital person, the user therefore, is primarily a container of information that can be exploited by entities, institutions, companies and so on. The constant profiling and archiving of our interactions on the web generates a shift in the definition of user, which has shifted to 'used'. This double connotation, both passive and active, can be also associated with other analyses, among which we can find the role of the spectator-actor, typical of widespread amateur videos and online virals (live streaming, gaming, ASMR videos, and so on). One could say that within what Jenkins calls convergent culture, users move between this plethora of frameworks sometimes as players and sometimes as NPCs, and, almost always (consciously or unconsciously), both at the same time. 

Gemma Fantacci: The selfie is one of the main “characters” of Arte e Social Media. You argue that this genre of photography transforms the subject into her or his own avatar through digital manipulation. At the same time, the selfie is a “regulator of emotions”: with the aid of filters, one can generate countless expressions, from the playful to the theatrical. Your artistic practice is very eclectic. In the past you produced several filters for Instagram, ranging from Compulsive Love to Falling Love. Can you discuss this body of work? How did you approach the practice of creating Instagram filters?

Kamilia Kard: Rather than as a creator, I initially approached this tool as a performer of facial filters: from 2014 to 2020 I constantly archived images or videos in which I interpreted filters that I found online and considered interesting to use.

In 2018, I began to create my own filters, initially trying to reproduce small elements already present in some of my works in the form of a facial filter. Later, I moved away from the idea of using the facial filter as a repurposing of something I had already done, and turned towards programming filters that had an autonomous life and/or could be used as a tool to make new work. This is the case with Compulsive Love, a filter that applies glitter tears to the face. I used it for the site-specific video installation I exhibited on the façade of EP7 in Paris, in which I reinterpreted frames from Baz Luhrmann's film Romeo + Juliet (1996). From the emo-glitter-chic of this filter, I completely changed aesthetics and published Heart-Shape-Face, a filter that deforms heads by transforming them into hearts. Grotesque and funny, to this day it is definitely  the one that is most used and has had the most positive feedback among my filters. Facial deformations are used by a wider audience in terms of gender and age. Very often they are used as a variant of the person in the amateur performances we see on TikTok (when the tiktoker wants to represent themselves as a child, to transform themselves into their father to tell a family story, and so on), to give a visual impact of the emotional consequence of something or a speech, or are simply shared as funny and grotesque images and videos. Unlike filters that require users to make expressions to be activated, in this type of filter the performativity of expression stems spontaneously, provoked by the exploration of the new contour limits that the camera applies to the face.

There is also the Warp Clouds filter, a foreground on which the little clouds from the video game Super Mario Bros, so beloved by artists, flow. The blue of the sky changes gradation, while the small white clouds become transparent when in contact with the face, like small portals that allow a glimpse of what lies beyond the filter.

Falling Love is a video game that uses a particular facial expression: the kiss becomes the controller of the interaction of the filter. In order to move the cursor left and right and catch as many hearts as possible — avoiding the black ones that trigger  the game over — people have to stretch their lips, lean them forward in the common mimicry of kissing and show them to the camera. “Send a Kiss” becomes the instruction to follow in order to receive Love points and love is translated into a numerical value. The idea stems from my research into the emotions expressed and felt online and how these are then instrumentalised for the profiling of the individual user and consequently the audience in general. There are so many interactive filters, even non-games, that are activated by the request “send a kiss”, and it is interesting to note how such a gesture, defined as intimate in most cases, is instead carried out on command, released from any form of sentiment or romance, a mere input. The interaction between camera and person is the most interesting and amusing part to observe, a very theatrical gesture with which we wink at the screen: opening our mouths, winking or, as in this case, blowing kisses, is functional to the nature of the filter and generates what I call emotionless expressions. Facial filters are generators of expressions on a global scale. Only later the performativity of the filter emerges,  addressed to third parties when sharing it with the public. Before then it remains an intimate action, placing one’s figure in the center of the rectangular window of the display and playing with it. We can choose whether to just play, whether to play and archive, or finally whether to share with the network. In this case, sharing online photos and videos with filters applied is not only a means to demonstrate one’s appearance, but also a display of one's expressiveness, even if it is dictated by the demands of a program.

Gemma Fantacci: Both your artistic research and practice show how the concept of the avatar extends beyond the video game sphere. Having mapped so extensively the production, manipulation, and dissemination of the digital image and body – not to mention the evolving trends related to representation – did you get a sense of what lies ahead for the avatar?

Kamilia Kard: I don't really know what to expect from the avatar in the future, but I don’t think it will lose its representational function; on the contrary, its role will probably be greatly enhanced, both positively and negatively. For example, let’s consider the fact that several fashion houses, including Gucci, Balenciaga, and Burberry to name a few, have started selling their branded skins on different metaverses. Moreover, Mark Zuckerberg opened a shop of luxury skins for Meta house avatars. I don’t know if integrating dynamics already present in the offline world is an enhancement, we can rather call it either a transposition or a duplication. What it seems to me talking about the future of the avatar, is that rather than trying to achieve the most realistic representation — which for example MetaHuman aspires to — within the social sphere, the focus is more on how to reach a “realistic” consolidation of pre-existing social and economic dynamics.

In general, talking of the present, I noticed that the life cycle of an avatar — understood as a “body” — retraces the path of Ann Lee, the lead character in Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe’s work No Ghost Just a Shell (1999). Ann Lee, in fact, begins as an anonymous manga character, a pencil drawing, which over time is transformed - through the interpretation of other artists invited by Parreno and Huyghe — into coloured 2D animation, 3D animated model, into a legal person and finally into a flesh-and-blood person with the performance of Tino Sehgal.  The transition from a character to an avatar and finally to a performer presents oscillating and repeating characteristics typical of a sine wave. On social networks such as TikTok, we constantly see amateur performances of people simulating Grand Theft Auto’s NPCs, I have more than once seen videos - of memetic nature - that mixed the simulation of NPC movements with the cosplaying of characters reminiscent of famous films or television series. Similarly, there are speakers in ASMR videos whispering to viewers dressed as cosplayers. Well-known pop culture characters who become skins within video games such as Fortnite and Fall Guys, and much more. In this digital plenitude— I’m referring to Jay David Bolter’s notion —, the avatar and the character continue to leave the screen, only to re-enter it in another form or format or social channel in a constant, swinging way.

Gemma Fantacci: Is there anything you would like to add? 

Kamilia Kard:  <3

TOXIC GARDEN - DANCE DANCE DANCE

live performance inside Roblox, color, sound, 9’ 59”, 2022, Italy

Created by Kamilia Kard, 2022

Courtesy of Kamilia Kard, 2022

Music by Rafael Bresciani

Sound design of Toxic Garden’s map by Cristina Katja Angeloro

Made with Roblox (Roblox Corporation, 2006)