What do avatars want now? Posthuman embodiment and the technological sublime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article connects the current fascination with immersive experience to the question of embodiment and representation by avatar presence. It also references the `pictorial' and `affective' turns in theory in order to discern `what avatars want', a play on the cultural theorist W. J. T. Mitchell's ideas. We propose that `truth' or `real' has very little to do with how we feel about our avatar creations which are in effect self-portraits. Their existence reveals our desires, yearnings, fears and insecurities. The avatar is an animated, performed image which mirrors our desire to inject it with subjectivity, while at the same time thinking of it as an object. Avatar embodiment also points us to the technological sublime. Reflecting the natural sublime, we argue that the technological version is part and parcel of our relationship to self and our avatar instantiations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".