“Heart of an Avatar : A Preliminary Document of the Internet” was conceived through a 58 day non-stop 24/7 real game play created by Omsk Social Club,
to which eight people took it in turns to collectively role-play a format to which the main protagonist Eastyn Agrippa a multiple-being wrote their memoir from the perspective of being an avatar, human, spirit multi-being.
Over the course of the two months, Eastyn lived and interacted solely online never leaving their apartment, connected to their core community on discord and the internet at large. They investigated new forms of radical connectivity through the glitch-course of human and avatar. This generated 58 unique NFTS as memoir, for each day they were alive.
During this period Eastyn took apart past and emergent theories surrounding the ontology of the avatar and net culture through the genre of theory-fiction to layout muses, arguments and ideas surrounding the topics of disembodied intimacy, death as multiple, belief and legitimacy online, self abolishment, body in code and safe spaces vs hurt spaces.
As the final act of the work, Heart of an Avatar <3 the archive of Eastyn's 58-day RGP "Unrealism" was scraped and reconstructed into a large-scale installation consisting of screens, lightboxes and artefacts that play on the structure of totemic as a medium, thinking through the culture that surrounded the work as a linguistic system and representing the satellite body of that; scripts and code made physical. Alongside this, a newly commissioned audiobook extract has been produced by DJ TinyHandz leaking the words of Eastyn interwoven with textures of genre-bending nostalgia and sonic memes, making up a complex track of literature and sonic screenshots of the internet at large, the life Eastyn existed within as they wrote “Heart of an Avatar : A Preliminary Document of the Internet”
The first iteration of the work was commissioned by Kunstraum Kreuzberg, the second editing process was made possible by Callie's residency program and the third via the release of 58 unique NFT fully-gif illustrated books from Folia.app. The fourth iteration was created for "Collective Collective Worldbuilding – Art in the Metaversum" Curated by Sabine Himmelsbach and Boris Magrini at HEK.
“A joyful glimpse into a not-too-distant future in which the distinction between the real and the unreal no longer bears any ontological weight, and a practical grimoire for running interference patterns against the control centre of the unified self.”
Amy Ireland
"HEART OF AN AVATAR is a dream-like manifesto for collectively built worlds and online identities."
Trust
“Heart of an Avatar” investigates topics of digitally-mediated identity through the multi-entity Eastyn Agrippa. Effervescent and relatable despite its abstract premise, the epub reminds us of the wonder and mystery we once felt in online life. A yummy work of both investigative criticism and fiction. It made me forget my name.
Catherine Leigh Schmidt, 0x Salon Researcher
“This book is a must read! It articulates a unique POV and quintessential use case that will hopefully improve your understanding of intersection of creativity + Web3, NFT, Metaverse and the internet.” Larry Ossei-Mensah
“In role play the term bleed is used to describe a transference from the fictive to the real or vis versa, reading this text I get a tangible sense of bleed, it’s reality wilfully ebbing out somehow shaping my idea of myself, the future and nature of things.
Ed Fornieles
“Hypercommunication. It looks like communication but it is not, it is beyond. A constant, multidirectional and vertiginous flow of information. A magickally chaotic tsunami of data where we lose the ability to navigate, a key notion for Cybernetics (from the Greek word “navigate”, "governance" or something like that). This cardinal disorientation makes us overlook the medium we are dissolving our multiple selves in and the system that "navigates" us. Who is steering my boat, who? Who is taking me adrift, who?”
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However, things got complicated. Eastyn, you are the living proof.
Luther Blissett
