Body Surrogates: Mannequins, Life-Size Dolls, and Avatars

One of the tropes of these early years of the twenty-first century is that of the avatar, a virtual representation of a human being used for entertainment , educational, technical, or scientific purposes. The avatar is a product of digital culture, but its origins are coeval with those of the human being and its evolution is affected by material conditions and the level of technology currently achieved by a given society. The origin of the word " avatar " has a spiritual connotation: It was associated with Hinduism and used to describe a deity who took a terrestrial form. More generally, however, whether in terms of religion or computing, we could define the avatar as a surrogate, a body—real or virtual—that replaces another. The origins of the avatar in Western societies date back to the modern era, which was founded on mechanical technology and marked by the birth of urban culture. At that time, between the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a typical surrogate for the human body was the mannequin. Mannequins were displayed in shopping windows, bearers of fashion trends and styles. They later became a symbol of conformity that reached a peak under totalitarian governments, embodying those values of efficiency that put the human body on the same level as machines, both the machine of industrial production and the war machine. As a substitute, the mannequin in society played a purely functional role, taking the place of the human body in activities that the human being, out of dignity or resistance, wouldn't perform. These included mannequins used for commercial purposes as well as those later used for testing in the automotive industry and military engineering. Other mannequins, meanwhile, had a completely different fate: They became the subject of photographs and paintings, employed as cultural artifacts, fetishes or symbols of a mass culture that artists were either fascinated by or wanted to criticize.