Latest addition to my New World Notes Classics archive (bottom right column) is my interview in 2007 with Tasrill Sieyes, who tells me about turning Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase into a Second Life avatar:
I was showing someone my abstract avatars that I have made, and they mentioned that making a 3D form of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” would be great... [S]he loves the painting and after seeing my other work she wanted to see what it would look like transformed into SL form...
It is an interesting feeling [being this avatar]. Kind of... freeing. I am not bound by the normal limits of anthropomorphic avatar. And I can think far more artistically. I don't know [why], to be honest. I don't think too much about how my various bits of art make me feel, I just let them make me feel, and let it wash over me.
More here, and see also my interview with the creator of this amazing exoskeleton. Created before the coming of mesh and mesh-enhanced avatars in 2012 or so, they illustrate how diverse and innovative Second Life avatars used to be.
Most of that creative community has since been over-shadowed by the massive mesh body economy around hyper-realistic human avatars, and I'm not sure there's a way of bringing that pre-mesh level of originality back -- short of a massive marketing effort on Linden Lab's part. Perhaps the coming of puppetry may help somewhat?
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