Can Avatars Feel?

Western culture has long been haunted by automata which would pass every Turing

Test, from androids to ʻreplicantsʼ (such as those in Ridley Scottʼs Blade Runner).

These technical similes of humans are a particularly modern obsession, or at least a

humanist one; certain predecessor myths like Pygmalion or the Golem were

especially conspicuous against the Renaissance, an era when the human aspect of

the human animal started to be conceived of as both the lack of predetermination and

the potential for creation–when being human became a task, humanity something to

be performed or brought into being. In the 19th and 20th centuries, this humanist

preoccupation found a new playground in technological progress, via artificial similes

of humans mirroring and distorting achievements in the physical sciences.

When viewed from this humanist background, utopian and android narratives

share an intellectual climate embracing two premises: first, the belief that being

human is something to be brought forth; and further, that humanity is capable of

doing so in new and unforeseen ways. Following the Pygmalion precedent, artificial

beings help overcome the deficiencies of human nature; alternately, as with the

Golem narrative, bringing forth new creatures can produce an uncanny autonomy

that, if not tamed by a reference to God, tends to threaten the harmonic and better

courses of old-fashioned nature.

Looking back on these constructions today can leave a distinct feeling of

datedness; through the glasses of the post-utopian Zeitgeist, and without the fuel of

utopian or apocalyptic visions, androids and the modernist obsession with them look

passé. Those who wish to rekindle that past fascination in service to a new narrative

face a task as difficult as that of Arnold Schwarzenegger's post-Governorship body

conveying the awe of his original Terminator.

A second, less outdated option through which to consider “homme machine”

phenomena is the cyborg, an unstable hybrid easily brought into line with post-

modern theory. Although the cyborg can reflect visions of a new and different

humanity, it seems independent from the utopian spirit. Avant la lettre – before

cybernetics – the cyborg appeared in the martial visions of Filippo Tommaso

Marinettiʼs novel Mafarka il futurista. As in android narratives, Marinetti conceives of

technical artifacts as having their own autopoietic logic, with the powers of

engineering changing old-fashioned humanity into something more vivid, intense, and

destructive. But for the first time, this independent logic was applied to human

prostheses, creating a hybrid without a clear center of agency – bringing forth what

today would be called a cyborg. With the last breath of his dying human body, the

hero Mafarka transfers his soul into the winged Gazurmah; his creation then takes off

to challenge the sun. In Marinetti, merging with machines is the only way for humans

to keep up with them.

In this vision, the soul provides the human component of the cyborg; the body

is essentially either the animal or the machine. The rise of information technology has

altered that construction, as the mind itself becomes a matter of engineering; under

the auspices of information technology, challenging the sun becomes something

more mental. To quote Donna Harawayʼs Cyborg manifesto: “Our best machines are

made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals,

electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently

portable, mobile [...]. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and

opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.”1 Haraway perceives Ficino and Hegelʼs

versions of the World Spirit morphing into the somewhat banal shape of a transparent

IT network; cyborgian existence is conceived of as something potentially independent

of an opaque material body, pure information. If, in the digital age, the spirit itself has

become technical, it becomes far more difficult to place human engineering and

human nature in opposition; indeed, the cyborg now can be considered a paradigm

for the deconstruction of this very dichotomy. Modern super-humanity is left behind

as post-humanity sets in.

This possibility implies a perfection of what had been somehow deficient in

Marinetti. There is a suggestion of post-Aristotelian (or post-Thomistic) opposition of

form and substance in this setting, information being the form emerging from a

substance. I use post-Aristotelian because the logic of neo-cybernetics regards form

as an autopoietic system emerging from another autopoietic system, and so on.

Music and its acoustic qualities can be described as a dynamic system closed upon

itself even as it emerges from amplifier-loudspeaker dynamics; these dynamics can 1 Donna Haraway: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Craig Hanks (ed): Technology and Values – Essential Readings, Malden MA: Blackwell, p. 228.

be described as a system that itself emerges from the algorithms of processing an

MP3 file, which in turn emerges from the physical reactions taking place in the

hardware, which then emerge from molecular interactions, et cetera. Each of these

systems has its own autonomous logic and form (psychological, analogue, digital,

physical), even as that very form emerges from the form of the underlying system.

The substance of one form is nothing but another form – there is no substance that

would not be form as well. Information is all there is. This allows post-human, post-

utopian cyborgian existence to engage nature and technique on the same scale: Both

being considered systems interacting and interfering with each other and making

ʻhumanʼ existence emerge from that interaction and interference, there is no such

thing as a natural ʻsubstanceʼ or substantial nature to be taken into consideration.

Harawayʼs less radical point is that information without substance is

completely transparent and immaterial, at least insofar as it can be transmitted from

one material substance to another – and because the material substances are

nothing but parts of the information process, transmission is all that counts. A

disregard for substance and focus on forms emerging from each other go along with

the odd prevalence of the immateriality present in this new information-cyborg made

of light and energy. Light had always been a platonic metaphor for the immaterial

mind; indeed, one could say that, in merging with machines, human minds can share

networks and even virtual environments dissolving spatial distance and seemingly

independent from the material world. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht recently argued that

such couplings of mind and software present in our everyday lives have extended

rather than undermined the Platonic or Cartesian mind.2 Certainly, we often seem

very close to living the mental life of a consciousness that does not take up space (it

is tele-present even in the most remote areas of the world), but rather builds its reality

upon clear and distinct sets of knowledge (which have to be represented this way in

order to be googled, or to subsume social relations to the digital logic of accepting or

declining friend requests on Facebook).

Perhaps the ʻnowhereʼ of virtual reality is the successor of the ʻnowhereʼ (the

ʻimaginaryʼ place) of utopian reality. But if so, there is also one crucial difference:

Virtual reality is already there. It can even create hybrids and interact with the non-

2 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Shall We Continue to Write Histories of Literature?, New Literary History 39, 3 (2008), pp. 519-532.

virtual world, as takes place in GPS systems, bringing forth a hybrid of the world itself

and a model thereof. What once had been mental (the imaginary model of the world)

and what had been physical (the ʻouterʼ sensual world) share one reality. There is no

distinction between the imaginary model and the factual reality of the world – a

distinction so crucial in utopian thinking. More importantly, instead of going the long

way between a model of the world and its factual realization, technologically

enhanced shortcuts between theory practice are possible: Where once a skill was

needed, we now use a smart-phone app. Thus, as Gumbrecht has argued, in the

process of connecting our minds with information networks our material bodies often

seem to have become oddly superfluous.

This dimension of the ʻhomme machineʼ brings me to the third and most recent

version, the avatar. The shift from cyborg to avatar is not truly a shift in the concept of

the human machine; in terms of functionality, avatars can be conceived as ʻhybridʼ,

vis-á-vis ʻcyborgianʼ. The difference between the cyborg and the avatar lies in the

focus of interest: While the cyborg is a paradigm for engineering humans and

humanizing machines, the avatar raises the question of animation, in both senses of

the word: It embraces issues of the special effects of animation, and concerns the

giving of a ʻsoulʼ (anima) to an artifact. Furthermore, whereas cyborgs are generally

conceived of as self-referential systems, avatars are relational phenomena based on

participation. The avatar paradigm does not entail the creation of a new being to

inhabit the world, as the cyborg would; rather, an avatarʼs purpose is to allow humans

to become present in a virtual (or at least remote) reality. The essential characteristic

of the avatar is that it creates new ways of being human in an artificial environment.

So where the cyborg focuses on one system emerging from another system, the

avatar is based on how the systems participate with and in one another. An avatar is,

in essence, a non-autonomous figuration. Avatars can therefore be described – to

use Bruno Latourʼs terms – as manifestations of ʻdistributedʼ rather than personal

agency.

Latour, in his tentative manifesto of compositionism,3 accordingly chose the

Avatar paradigm as an alternative to both modernist and postmodernist conceptions

of humanity and nature. Nature, in this view, is no longer considered a monolithic 3 Bruno Latour: An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”, New Literary History 41,3 (2010), p. 471.

entity or ideological supposition of a thing that is not constructed. Rather, it is present

as the multiplicity of what is given – a multiplicity that is itself composed and can be

composed. Likewise with the avatar; indeed, in aligning his concepts of agency with

those of animation, Latour argues that avatars are consistent with ʻanimistʼ

worldviews. Compositionism does not challenge the constructivist understanding that

natural and engineered systems are working on the same scale. But instead of

considering how the concept of nature is itself a construction, Latour focuses on how

natural and technical constructions are put together and interrelate, how they

distribute agency and how this agency becomes ʻanthropomorphousʼ. So, he

positions his animist stance against modernist and post-modernist concepts that do

not animate the chains of cause and effect in which they search for materialist world

views.

In making this point, Latour refers to James Cameronʼs film Avatar. He summarizes

the movieʼs context as follows:

Pandora is the name of the mythical humanoid figure whose box holds

all the ills of humanity, but it is also the name of the heavenly body that

humans from planet Earth (all members of the American military-

industrial complex) are exploiting to death without any worries for the

fate of its local inhabitants, the Naʼvis, and their ecosystem, a

superorganism and goddess called Eywa. I am under the impression

that this film is the first popular description of what happens when

modernist humans meet Gaia. And itʼs not pretty.

In Cameronʼs film, the Naʼvis triumph over their oppressors with the help of Eywa.

The plot is thus a standard entry into to the narrative trope of a natural indigenous

group fighting to maintain their way of life against a malevolent modernist group; their

success, while slightly less typical, is hardly unprecedented. Certainly, Cameron has

never been hailed for original narratives; however, he has a genius for turning trite,

underdeveloped, or over-familiar narratives into impressively complete movies.

Latour, however, is interested in a particular reading of this plot–as a plea for

the creation of alliances between human and non-human actors via a networked

collective. This interpretation is possible because of a deviation from the standard

narrative in how nature is conceived and presented: In Cameronʼs film, nature is not

treated as non-constructed or non-artificial; it holds similarities to a network of

distributed agency. But there appears to be more to this fact than Latour discusses.

Indeed, as Bruce Clarke has argued,4 nature is present here as the most advanced

virtual construction achieved in film history. While the ʻback to natureʼ movies of the

1970s enshrined their message through the documentary aesthetic of filming nature

itself, Cameronʼs Gaia is found within a technologically advanced, effect-based virtual

reality. So the question becomes: How can a completely made-up world, one that

moreover advertises its use of the most advanced technologies of virtual reality to

create that world, be marked as natural? Clarke, arguing from a more post-modernist

point of view than Latour, notes a central “paradox” here: If nature in the film is

something brought forth by filmic discourses naturalizing it, and if nature as such

does not exist – because it is nothing but a set of systems declared to be natural,

even though those systems are always interacting with similar systems declared to

be technological – then the narrativeʼs second-order discourse makes the film an

“inverted sign of its own production.”5

I got to know Clarke during a wonderful evening in a Berlin restaurant, where

we stayed until nearly dawn discussing this very movie. Most of my thoughts on

Avatar have followed from this conservation and subsequent vivid e-mail exchanges.

Nonetheless, obvious as my enjoyment of our discussion is, I wish to challenge this

reading, turning his arguments down the opposite path. Actually, viewing the filmʼs

narrative as being inverted by a second-order discourse of its making reads oddly in

light of Cameronʼs deep investment in nature. Cameron is an active hobbyist in deep

sea biology and vigorous opponent against construction of the Belo Monte Dam in

Brazil due to its threat to both nature and the native populations living in that region;

given this environmental engagement, I do not believe that Cameron presents nature

as a concept undermined by technologies of the virtual.

My alternative reading is based on presence effects. Clarke observes that

filmic technologies “refine physical bodies in digital bits,” and that Avatar thereby

4 Bruce Clarke: Embodied Mediation – Semiosis in ‘Avatar’, paper presented at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Weimar, forthcoming in ZMK, Spring 2012. 5 Ibid.

“celebrates the power of media-technological links to manipulate reality through its

representations.” However, I think this reading does not match either the logic of

avatar technology or the power of special effects: It fails in terms of logic because

both avatar technology and special effects are based on presence instead of

representation, participation instead of observation (let alone second-order

observation); it does not match the power because it does not engage embodiment in

a manner which takes evolutionarily shaped human bodies (i.e. their capacity for

feeling, perceiving, etc.) fully into consideration.

Accordingly, despite Clarkeʼs critique, I wish to follow Latour in his attempt to

link the issues of Modernism and Nature to the paradigm of the avatar – and to do so

following his paradigm of ʻanimismʼ. However, to properly assess the relationship

between the avatar and Hollywood technology, I refrain from using Latourʼs concept

of distributed agency. Indeed, I think that Latourʼs way of defining animism is itself not

animist enough to truly be about embodiment. My main paradigm will instead be

participation, especially emotional participation. From this position, I focus on the

difference between composition in construction and composition in participation.

Finally, I propose participation as an alternative to post-human figurations which, in

my eyes, remain too beholden to post-modern paradigms.

I first have to clarify what I mean by participation, and why I consider participatory

composition different from constructivist composition. Participation has two sides, one

compatible and one incompatible with systems theory. The compatible side is the

interactions taking place on the same scale – the interaction of two systems which,

as such, can be described as a new system emerging from this very interaction. For

example, when a human being (understood as a system) interacts with a virtual

environment (also understood as a system), this very interaction can also be

described as a system, emerging from (and as) interaction. This kind of participation

is very much in the line of Latour, who defines composition as “Things… put together

(Latin componere) while retaining their heterogeneity.”6

This definition, though, is imprecise at best and incomplete at worst. To

continue his metaphor of composition: Latourʼs argument holds for the work of a

composer who arranges notes and instruments to create harmonies or dissonances 6 Latour: “Compositionist Manifesto”, p. 473f.

through their maintained specificity and heterogeneity, yet is inadequate to contain

the composition itself as an enaction of the music, at least in phenomenological

terms. Likewise, it would be misleading to state that a dancer “composes” (to use

Latourʼs term) various factors – locomotive action patterns, gestural signs, musical

melody, and rhythm – while maintaining their heterogeneity. The term “composition”

may be useful to describe the distribution of agency; but it is inadequate in describing

skillfully enacted, emotional embodied activity.

This is why I think participation, rather than composition should be used as a

paradigm. It is at this point, though, that participation becomes incompatible with

system theory, in that, it cannot be brought completely in line with autopoietic

systems emerging from each other. My argument is very simple: To describe one

system emerging from a different system (or from the interaction of different

systems), a clear division must be made between what is to be considered a system.

To describe one system emerging from another system, there must be a clear

boundary between what elements of the underlying system will be considered

functions of the new system, and what comprises the environment of this system.

Such definitions might appropriately describe nature and culture in constructivist

terms, but they are inapt when applied to phenomenology.

To pick up the musical metaphor again: The phenomenological question in

music is less about how an acoustic system of music emerges from the algorithms of

an MP3 file, than it concerns how musical emotions relate to musical acoustics. At

first glance two different systems are described; but their description ignores how

acoustics are already embodied emotionally, and how musical components become

music phenomenally in a subliminal dance embracing both acoustics and

emotionality. The emotional meaning of music, hence, does not really emerge from

its acoustic meaning – or if it does, it does so without clearly distinguishing the

emotional system from the acoustic system. The form of the emotional system is not

autonomous in relation to the form of the acoustical system; they participate in one

another. The ʻcompositionʼ implied is therefore not a ʻconstructionʼ, but based on

sharedness. Form does not emerge from substance (that then turns out to be the

form of another substance, and so forth); yet the very distinction between form and

substance becomes problematic.

This notion of participation is post-Platonic rather than post-Aristotelian, as

Plato did not conceive of a neat distinction between “form” and “substance.” Plato's

concept of participation was methexis, literally “with-having;” this was superseded by

Aristotle's notion of hexis, a substance having a form as a property. Aristotleʼs hexis

is evident in hylemorphism: A statue has the form of a man but is made of a

substance, wood (hyle), that in turn can easily be described as a form (brown, hard,

textured, etc.) of another substance (ʻmatterʼ itself). Platoʼs concept of methexis is

best exemplified by his conceptualization of eternity: Rather than an underlying

substance that has time as a sensually present form, time is the way in which eternity

is present on earth. It makes no sense in this context to designate eternity the

substance and time the form; but it does make sense to state that time has a share in

eternity insofar that it never stops (even though it is at the same time the very

condition through which things are not eternal and decay). Time “with-has” eternity. It

participates in eternity and has a share of it.

A dance, likewise, is not a sensual form emerging from music as an acoustic

system; it is a bodyʼs skillful way to take part in and become part of a more extended

music performance. Music is an aspect of the embodied action, and at the same time

that embodied action is an extension of music. Neither emerges from the other – both

share in each other. Music and dance take part in one another without the one being

the information transferred by the other, or the form emerging from the other. If a

dancer follows music, no “composition” of rhythm, harmony and bodily motion-

patterns takes place. The dancer does not compose a dance out of action patterns

and then combine it with music, but rather takes part in and becomes part of that

music. Perhaps this critique does not hold in ʻepistemologicalʼ terms, where it

certainly explains less than systems theory or compositionism would do. But at least

as far as tacit knowledge and skillful embodied action is concerned, I find this

paradigm of participation far more promising than the paradigm of composition (let

alone construction).

In my eyes, composition/construction versus participation is a crucial difference in

respect to avatars because it is through participation that things become animated.

For instance, in the beginning of many video games, you can arrange body parts to

produce your avatar – a procedure of constructive composition. But this process does

not itself animate the avatar; rather, the avatar is enacted once you are immersed in

the action of the game. Animation sets in when participation sets in. This is also true

for animation through special effects: It is not enough for animation to compose

movement by putting images into a cinematic sequence; animation also needs the

perceptual system of the human creating the effect, making the images ʻliveʼ by

giving them a soul, anima. Animation requires participation; and this is one of the

crucial issues underlying the interplay of modernity and nature, allowing for concrete

discussion of how a virtual body and a physical body – one shaped by algorithms and

the other shaped by evolution and cultural habituation – work together in a physical

environment.

Latourʼs discussion, with ʻactive mediatorsʼ rather than passive intermediaries

being at the base of animism, approaches such issues similarly, but I find this

insufficient. It is too reliant on the very distinction between ʻactiveʼ and ʻpassiveʼ – a

distinction that does not hold for participation. Latour does, perhaps, explain the

distributed agency an avatar has; but he does not explain how it feels to be or to

have an avatar. Yet even raising a question of either being or having is a misguided

approach. Indeed, I think that the (again Aristotelian) dichotomy of having and being

does not facilitate this discourse; it is better to talk of with-having an avatar,

participating in the avatar and making the avatar share oneʼs own life. Accordingly, I

also think that Latourʼs interest in the redefinition of “what it means to have a body, a

mind and a world” must be complemented by the question of what it means to

participate in the course of the world or share in a world as embodied minds.7

Therefore, instead of questioning the animism implied in the agency of avatars, I ask

how animism is felt or experienced. Rather than discussing networks distributing

agency, I discuss special effects involving bodily participation. And instead of

focusing on the composition of nature and technology in what follows I ask what kind

of presence of a physical body is possible in a virtual environment.

All of these questions are essential in a discussion of Avatar. Cameron has

specialized in homme-machine figurations since the android Terminator; Avatar

seems to consciously reflect the more recent, the post-humanist figurations of this

phenomenon. The cyborg appears again in this film, as Colonel Quatrich puts on the 7 Latour: “Compositionist Manifesto”, p. 472; emphasis mine.

Transformers-like battle suit, which enlarges all of his movements into techno-

gigantism; this seems to be a last echo of Marinettiʼs fantasies concerning Mafarka il

futurista. But the predominant figuration is, of course, the one that gives the film its

title. Furthermore, the relation of nature and engineering present in these

paradigmatic figurations is more than just a topic for a straightforward narrative; it

takes place as a visceral experience as well. Its main playground is the breathtaking

array of special effects. Cameron, a technical master of composing tele-presence

and feeling, made Avatar the first 3-D movie to properly and successfully work with

the evolutionarily shaped and culturally habituated visual perception of humans. If the

movie is about the composition of human nature and engineering, about animism and

animation, then the issue of nature and engineering cannot be settled in terms of

distributing agency only, nor by a kind of ʻreading for the plotʼ. The experience of the

film takes place in terms of sensual presence, feeling and embodiment – in terms of

animation. While the film might center topically on Gaiaʼs animist networks, its

aesthetic centers on animation bringing the physical body into the virtual world

sensually and emotionally, or making the virtual world a sensual and emotional

habitat for the physical body.

The relation of nature and engineering in terms of avatars thus cannot be

boiled down to network structures only, but also has to be described

phenomenologically. In this context, the answer to the ʻhomme-machineʼ question

cannot be provided just through description of how modernist networks encounter

animist networks; nor can it be described by analyzing embodiment from a point of

view based on the second-order meaning of media technology. Embodiment must be

considered more seriously, emphasizing what only bodies can do, what they feel and

how they feel it. The phenomenological relation is contextualized by the fact that

there are things even the most advanced computers cannot do – or rather, can only

share in when merging with ʻnaturalʼ bodies.8

This challenge entails a closer look at avatar technology. What video-game

developers call ʻpresenceʼ (the ʻsense of being thereʼ) provides some insight;9

8 Hubert Dreyfus: What Computers Still Can’t Do, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. 9 Mattew Lombard, Theresa Ditton: At the Heart of it All: The Concept of Presence, in The Journal of Computer Mediated Cognition 3,2 (1997), October 28, 2011, retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue2/lombard.html.

ʻbringing you thereʼ is one of the essential functions of avatars. This function is very

much in the line with the term in its original meaning, and perhaps why ʻavatarʼ won

the competition for denominating the new technological phenomenon.

The Sanskrit term ʻavatarʼ signifies the manifestation of a god on earth.

Avatars are how the gods become present in the sensually perceived world. This

sensual world, according to some currents in Hindu thought, is somewhat unreal or

virtual; therefore, avatars can be read as the way gods are present in virtual worlds.

Similar concepts exist in Western mythology as well – think of Zeus appearing as a

swan to seduce Leda. In this tradition of the myth, it becomes less clear if there is a

categorical division between the divine world and the sensual world (e.g. in Euripidesʼ

Helena); rather, the gods have different ways of inhabiting the same world and of

being present there. Gods as ʻavatarsʼ live and appear in different shapes, entering

different social realities at will rather than commuting between real and unreal worlds.

This Greek tradition is also highly relevant to the discussion of Avatar. The

avatars in Cameronʼs film are thoroughly Western. They lack the spiritual dimension

of the Sanskrit term. In the movie, avatars are material bodies inhabiting the same

planet on which the human characters also dwell in their human bodies. These

characters enter the avatar bodies without being transposed into a categorical

ʻelsewhereʼ – they are merely spatially dislocated, and even then not by much. This

highlights one crucial aspect of avatars: They tend to raise the question of how the

given actor (e.g. Zeus in the myth or the main character Jake Sully in the movie) is

present in the avatar.

There are multiple possibilities here; I offer a heuristic distinction, and bring

these down to the opposition of the Ancient Greek and Latin terms for mask:

Prosopon and persona. The Latin persona literally denotes what is sounding through

the clay of the mask used for theatrical drama – the voice of the actor. The focus lies

on what is behind the mask; the inner world of a person animates the dead matter by

sounding through it. Thus the main implication of the term persona is personal

expression; indeed, the term was first applied outside of the theatrical setting to

indicate the legal person in the Roman legal system.

The persona concept is apt for inscribing humans into systems of

representation; accordingly, the persona model of avatars is a paradigm for some

personality-intensive shared virtual environments such as Second Life. The avatars

in this game are designed to play with personalities – to express or fake them under

conditions of limited consequences. Having a body becomes a pure expression of a

mind, eliminating the flaws of nature and chance usually carried by a physical body.

Physical appearance is chosen and designed by the players. Verbal communication

takes place through messaging, while non-verbal communication is reduced to a set

of commands to be executed. Keeping within these limitations, Second Life is a more

perfect way of personal expression than a human body could ever achieve: The

reduction of subliminal or involuntary forms of communication – the participatory

sense-making of embodied interaction – is blocked.10 Generally, anything helping the

expression of minds is technically elaborated, while anything subliminal,

unintentional, and physically embodied is hidden behind the screen. No tone of voice,

no involuntary mimicry or gesture will reveal more about the person than they want

revealed. Such an environment is perfectly humanist; even embodied existence

becomes something to be produced and performed.

I am convinced that this hyper-Cartesian and hyper-Humanist model is only

one of many options, and not even the most successful candidate for avatar design.

For that, I turn rather to the completely different model of the prosopon, which is

focused on sensual presence and embodied interaction. The Greek term literally

means ʻfaceʼ; more precisely, a prosopon is the face as used in the act of face-to-

face interaction. As a synonym for mask this carries different implications: The

prosopon as a mask shares a body just as a face does; however, it is more

accurately put that the prosopon shares multiple bodies. If a prosopon is a fact of

face-to-face interaction, it is an embodiment of intercorporeal relationships rather

than of a single person. The primary characteristic of a prosopon mask is thus not

personal expression, but embodied participation.

Accordingly, the prosopon model of avatars is a prominent parameter in the

design of action-based games, which tend to prioritize the interface between physical

and virtual environment through technologies such as joysticks. Newer systems such

as Nintendoʼs Wii and Microsoftʼs Kinect enable the playerʼs body to become

increasingly present in the virtual world; as a result, the virtual and material worlds

are not set apart from each other as they are in systems like Second Life. That the

10 Hanne DeJaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo: Participatory Sense-Making, in: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6,4 (2007), pp.485-507.

two worlds can come into contact is the most important advance in avatar technology

in recent years, as computers not only interact with what ʻmindsʼ can do (i.e. the

characterizing aspect of humans, according to which they have been simulated

themselves), but also with what only bodies can do.

The prosopon style of avatars has also translated into robotics. Robotic

avatar-style technologies can, in fact, be expanded on the level of subtle motor tasks.

Chirurgical interventions, e.g., are often executed using a robotic scalpel in place of

the traditional instrument, allowing tele-present surgeons to treat patients remotely.

Drone technology offers another example of tele-present activity, suggesting the

kinds of jobs that might soon be performed through the use of robotic prosopon

avatars. As a hobby biologist, Cameron is familiar with the most advanced forms of

this technology. In his documentaries, a robotic submarine allowed for his crewʼs tele-

presence in the deep sea. The crew even had a name for the robot – and it may not

be chance that its name, “Jake,” is given to the main character in Avatar.

At present, companies like Anybot or VGo Communications design machines

allowing people to become tele-present in a remote real-world environment by means

of an avatar robot too. These robots respond in real-time to the commands of their

players and in turn transmit ʻsensualʼ data back to them. This technology is still in its

beginning stages; at first glance, a robot with a touchscreen as a ʻheadʼ transmitting

the image of the real person does not seem a significant advance in

videoconferencing. Nevertheless, experimental psychology has shown that even this

very rudimentary embodiment in interaction makes an enormous difference in how

people pay attention to each other, sense and respect personal space, and

converse.11

This also suggests possibilities for the future of tele-present embodied

interaction by prosopon-avatars even more exciting in terms of aesthetic issues. In

2008, the neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University studied a monkeyʼs brain

in reference to its motor skills; he connected the monkeyʼs brain with a robot, so that

when the monkey walked, the robot would make the same movements. To Nicolelisʼ

surprise, the monkey soon figured out how to steer the robot without having to move

11 Min Kyung Lee and Leila Takayama: “Now, I Have a Body”: Uses and Social Norms for Mobile Remote Presence in the Workplace, in: Proceedings of the CHI 2011, May 7–12, 2011, pp. 32-42.

itself.12 Similar cyborgian technologies have been employed for human use too,

allowing people to steer robots through ʻthoughts.ʼ13 Thus far, such immediate body

control over a robot seems possible only in terms of conscious control; but it is clear

that subliminal interactions will soon be similarly accessible, allowing for extremely

embodied interactions executed in tele-presence by robotic prosopon avatars.

Indeed, similar research aims at the experience of completely immersed felt

presence.

The difference between prosopon and persona avatars is thus crucial to the

question raised by the title of this article: Can avatars feel? According to the persona

model, they can not. The technology of persona avatars is designed to let a mind

express itself while making use of various bodies – preferably bodies which it has

composed according to its own creativeness in order to express itself even better.

The body of the avatar exists to express what the mind wishes to express – and

perhaps, in turn, to be the focalizer of sensual stimuli transmitted back to the physical

body. In the case of Leda and the swan, a persona-model Zeus would feel, not the

swan. Zeusʼ mind would be transmitted upon the swan; the swan, a senseless piece

of matter, would be animated by the invisible presence of Zeusʼ mind. The persona

would be a kyknomorphous mask hosting an anthropomorphous mind. Likewise, in

persona focused shared virtual environments, the player (presumed to be behind the

screen) feels, not the avatar.

The prosopon model works differently. Here, the swan is not just an instrument

of Zeusʼs mind; it is a kyknomorphous embodiment that is not categorically different

from the usual anthropomorphous embodiment of Zeus. The paradigm is not

transmission of a (human) mind upon a (swan) body, as it would be in the persona

model. Furthermore, prosopon embodiment goes beyond transportation of a body-

mind into a different place; rather, the paradigm is the participation of two bodies

with/in one another. Not only does Zeus feel like a swan (e.g. experiences what it is

to have wings), but the experiential participation of god and avatar can also be

described as a swan feeling like Zeus (e.g. in feeling lust for humans).

12 Miguel A. L. Nicolelis & John K. Chapin: Controlling Robots with the Mind, in: Scientific American 18 (2008), pp. 72–79. 13 For an overview concerning this issue, see Helen Thompson: Robot Avatar Body Controlled by Thought Alone, in: New Scientist 2872 (July 2012), pp. 19-20.  

I believe that something similar holds for gamers using prosopon avatars:

They enter their avatars both as transmitted minds and with their bodies. This relates

to what Cheryll Campanella Bracken has observed in tracing the physical movement

of video gamers. Bad players and novices tended to react with their physical body to

what happened to their avatar; they ducked if a sword threatened to behead the

avatar, expressing a parallelization between their bodily reactions and the virtual

body made visible onscreen. The virtual image seemed to interfere with their

embodied existence. Skilled and experienced players, however, handled their avatar

without mimicking the movements they wanted the avatar to make, appearing as

motionless and paralyzed as the body of Jake Sully as he inhabits his Avatar. Indeed,

Bracken found watching these players very boring; they simply did not move at all,

their embodied existence apparently having found another center inside the virtual or

remote world – just as the monkey at Duke University found other legs to execute its

walking.

This contrast highlights the importance of considering the learning process for

prosopon avatars: Composition is not enough for making them work; they require

training and habituation. Thus it is impossible to think about prosopon avatars in

terms of ʻtransmitting minds upon bodiesʼ or ʻtransporting an embodied mind

elsewhereʼ. Rather, the players learn to bodily move and act in the virtual world, while

becoming part of and taking part in that world. Just as in Cameronʼs movie, the

original physical body becomes paralyzed and useless – not because the mind

dwells elsewhere (as would be the case in persona avatars); nor does it becomes

useless because the embodied existence of this mind is transported elsewhere. The

body becomes motionless, in so far as it is extended and because it is focused on

this extension.

There is yet another dimension to the paradigm. In the mythical example,

participation does not only refer to the relation between Zeus and the swan, but also

to the relation between the Swan-Zeus and Leda. Sexual relations occur between

individuals, but the best way to have bad sex is according to a persona model – i.e.

letting the bodies express the sexual partnership while the minds reflect on what to

express by using oneʼs body or theorize on what the body of the partner expresses –

such as takes place in Second Life. I cannot imagine Zeus bothering to inhabit the

swan in order to have a similar experience. In my eyes, Zeus and Leda do not have

sex as persons, but as interacting bodies sharing each other; the minimal condition

for this is a prosopon-model of avatars, at least as far as sensual feeling is

concerned (their various identities would be a different issue).

Comparison with Cameronʼs movie underlines this position. After Jake as his

avatar has sex with Neytiri, we hear her saying, “I am with you, Jake. Now we are

mated for life.” As the avatarʼs body falls asleep, Jake is abruptly brought back into

his human body by the harsh voice of Colonel Quatrich: “What the hell are you doing,

Jake?” As Bruce Clarke has convincingly argued, this sequence gives the immediate

sensation of being a voice-over of Jakeʼs inner voice – its dramatized enaction of his

thoughts in the outer world – and thus is a play on the ʻmorning afterʼ-experience,

when a loverʼs embodied way of participatory sense-making without identity

performance is followed by the self-aware jolt of “What am I doing?” The same

question is, indeed, an expression of a persona troubled by its prosopon existence.

The person in this movie is associated with the human body, whereas the embodied

existence is associated with the Avatar.

The difference between persona avatars and prosopon avatars is, of course, only

heuristic; the figurations can intermingle easily. But the distinction is crucial in

reconsidering the relation of animation and animism. A persona model of avatars

would search for the animation by establishing a hidden intention making events

interpretable as actions. Agency, in this model, has something to be about – about-

ness makes the actions directed. A prosopon model does not require such about-

ness; rather than searching for intent, it would search for the intrinsic orientation of

the action – the dichotomy of automatized and habitualized action and the intrinsic

feel for these actions rather than what they are about. In this orientation, rather than

the intention, its agency would take place.

This latter point underlies the importance of the feelings of avatars. A persona

model of avatars would imply about-ness even when dealing with emotions. Feelings

would be understood as the judgment of a player upon something happening in the

virtual world; the avatar expresses the feelings of the player, with feeling being

something inner that ʻsounds throughʼ. In the prosopon model, the player is

embedded in the avatarʼs activity and this activity is embedded in the avatarʼs world.

This is closer to an enactive approach to emotions, according to which emotionality is

an intrinsic orientation of embodied actions, understood as a form of evaluation

inherent in embodied activities. Emotionality is conceived of as an orientation that

does not rely on about-ness, as would intentionality or judgment. This is why

emotions are so successful in evolutionary terms as well: They do not require the

detour of (mental) representation.14

This changes the questions surrounding animism as well. The animism of

persona avatars relies on the transmission of intention in actor networks, and

requires a hidden anthropomorphous agent behind what happens in the virtual world.

The animism of prosopon avatars relies upon animation enabling physical bodies to

participate in virtual or remote interaction. To say it again: Persona avatars cannot

feel, because they only represent a person or express the feelings of a human mind.

Prosopon avatars can feel because they participate in human embodied action;

human bodies participate in their activities rather than human minds being

transposed upon them.

Cameron seems to understand this difference very well. The Naʼvi are provided with

a kind of proboscis attached to the back of their heads, tsaheylu (“the bond”); they

use this to build connections with other creatures on their planet, allowing them to

participate in one anotherʼs lived experiences. The tsaheylu is evidently a functional

equivalent of the technical network built by human scientists to transmit the human

mind to the avatarʼs body, but it cannot transmit remote minds to different bodies; it

functions only among present bodies unified in a shared activity. This is embodied

participation rather than transmission. The technical network is designed to control a

14 Just to avoid a misunderstanding: In no way do I wish to argue that Latour’s concept of agency is persona-based. It shares more similarities with the prosopon than with the persona. However, it is helpful to insert the persona-prosopon differentiation into his model for clarity and to avoid misleading conclusions. I find it particularly hard to avoid the persona-model when connecting the term agency with animism; in Latour's argumentation, too many persona questions set in, e.g. when he writes that animism and agency are concepts to be inserted to make sense of materialist or reductionist world views arguing in chains of cause and effect. What he searches for are active “mediators” to fill the gaps between cause and effect – turning the consequential concatenations into something provided with agency. But how one is to understand this agency if not in a way that cause and effect now have something to be about? The animism Latour ascribes to this model seems to go in the direction of ascribing a kind of intentionality to what happens – the anthropomorphism he intends thus seems due to a kind of personification. Furthermore, prosopon-avatars are about something shared, since the face itself is shared – at least in emotional communication taking place at the intrinsic orientation of shared interaction. The paradigm is participation instead of transference. Where a transmission network is about intentionality transferred from one body upon another body, animism in the actor networks is due to the composition of the human mind and avatar body – and it manifests as a transferred and composed intention.

body from somewhere else, by transmitting a mind – it is designed for persona

interaction. The tsaheylu instead effects what Vinciane Despret calls isopraxis – the

subliminal coordination of bodies joined in a single activity, such as the unity of horse

and rider.15 The tsaheylu works with shared action, establishing an emotional and

enactive bond orienting and coordinating shared motion.

When Jake Sully discovers the tsaheylu of his avatarʼs body, the scientist

Grace Augustine is very clear about the implications of the shared emotive/enactive

bond: “Donʼt play with that. Youʼll go blind!” The allusion is obvious: The tsaheylu is

there for ʻshared embodied interactionʼ, not for solipsist ʻmasturbation.ʼ Yet Augustine

does not know that a tsaheylu likewise does not exist for exchanging or transmitting

information. The name of the scientist herself is referential as well, invoking St.

Augustineʼs conception of free will as dependent on Godʼs grace, while strictly

separating a rational soul from the body. In Cameronʼs movie, this mind-body duality

is mirrored by an information-based understanding of the world and by a persona-

style approach to avatars. She deems the intrinsic participatory natural bonds present

on Pandora a “network,” while describing the connections of Gaia or Nature – Eywa

in the film – as echoing the cyborg model for merging mind and information

technology. Conceiving of Eywa as “a global network,” she states that “the Naʼvi can

access it, they can upload and download data, memories – at sites like the one you

destroyed.” However, she is completely wrong. The Naʼvi do not upload or download

anything; they participate. Nor do they care for data, but rather for embodied skills

and feelings in shared interaction or isopraxis.

In Grace's misconception of the nature of Eywa, the film draws a line between

composition and participation. Grace follows a constructivist approach, from which

some kind of cyborgian engineering could follow. This attempt seems to fail, because

Eywa does not work on a cybernetical level only. Indeed, describing Eywa as purely

cybernetic would be like describing music by focusing on what emerges from the

algorithms of an mp3 file; limited by this model, Grace lacks understanding of and

insight to Eywaʼs ways. Jake understands far more through his enactive ʻdancingʼ

with Eywa. This manifests in the last scene of the movie, when Jakeʼs human body

dies and he is completely embodied in his avatar. The final image is of his opening

15 Vinciane Despret: The Body We Care For: Anthropo-Zoo-Genesis, in: Body and Society 10,2-3 (2004), pp. 111-134.

eyes; having interactively played quite a lot with his avatarʼs tsaheylu, he has gained

the sight embodied in the avatar while losing the sight transmitted from it.

These two attitudes are mirrored by the different approaches taken by the

humans in the film towards the Naʼvis either focusing on observation (Grace) or

participation (Jake). To be more precise: The scientific approach seems to take place

in accordance with anthropological methods of participatory observation: Grace,

alongside her biological study of Nature, observes the Naʼvi with ethnographic

precision. But this increases her awareness of the limitations of the anthropologist

maxim, “Donʼt go native.” She understands that Jake might have trouble doing so,

and allows Jake to recur to what Loïc Wacquant calls “observing participation” or

“using habitus as a tool,” instead of handling it solely as a “topic.”16 Nonetheless,

when offering the advice “Try to see the forest through her [Neytiriʼs] eyes,” Grace

shows her own conceptual limitations. Failing to understand that participation is

different than identification or empathy, her model of ʻparticipationʼ is the simulation of

a different persona.

The difference of this model from prosopon interaction is made clear by Jake's

inability to consequently behave according to Graceʼs advice; instead of observing

the world through Neytiriʼs eyes, he gains comprehension as he falls in love with her

– that is, by emotionally participating in what the two lovers share instead of using

her as a further imaginary persona avatar. As with the difference between technical

transmission and tsaheylu interaction, the goal is not to take on an alien perspective,

but to share the subliminal orientation of embodiment. Jake ʻgoes nativeʼ by turning

towards pure participation, learning gestures, skills, and ways of feeling and being in

the world through embodied interaction. Tree-hugging, the metaphor most ridiculed

by the movieʼs villains, best describes this process; the paradigm is embodiment

rather than observation, as gaining knowledge of what everything is about requires

habituation and training rather than reflection.

The learning of skills involves something that cannot be described in concepts of

composition and construction: It requires doing the same things over and over again,

to the point where this practice is rewarded by automatization on the one hand, and 16 Loïc Wacquant: Habitus as Topic and Tool – Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter, October 28, 2011, http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/wacquant/wacquant_pdf/HABITUSASTOPICANDTOOL.pdf.

on the other by gaining a certain feel that can hardly ever be precisely expressed, let

alone transmitted to anybody else. This feel is intrinsic in the activity, resides in the

embodied action and orients it from inside; it cannot be transmitted by means of

exchanging information. It can be described, but a description is insufficient for the

actual feeling by another – the only way to share the feel with somebody else is by

making them go through the same skill-learning process. Crucially, while this feel is

conscious and extremely focused, it is not reflexive; indeed, reflection (i.e. directing

oneʼs mind upon it as a phenomenon or quale) will hinder it or even make it collapse.

The function of such a feel acquired through training is obvious. By allowing for

consciously guiding what otherwise would be a mere automatism or routine, the feel

becomes a fact of participation that easily escapes an all-too mechanical logic and is

even hard to grasp in cybernetic terms: The automatized movements are not simply

self-steered; their self-steering is oriented by conscious focusing. Steering the

motions shares conscious willful action. But on the other hand, this consciousness is

not autonomous either. It is not an external instance of evaluation, nor does it have

an intentional about-ness. Rather, it inhabits the movement and participates in the

activity. A good rower, for example, has not developed a feel for his or her own

embodied self; the focus lies on the resistance between the water and the oar blade

as a kind of prosthesis. The feel is to be searched for in the water, not in a delimited

body, let alone in the purely mental. None of the ʻsystemsʼ involved work in an

autopoietic manner, nor can their interaction be described as a composition of

elements; all is about participation – and thus about inhabiting a movement.

This leads back to my initial concern: Cameronʼs movie, in my view, shows

that the relation of nature and engineering and the question of the avatar as homme-

machine must be posed against the background of skillfulness, and thus beyond the

question of construction and composition. The playground for staging this problem is

the dichotomy of virtual presence and scientific observation. This dichotomy, indeed,

seems fundamental for Cameron; it is found in the feature film Titanic and the

biological documentaries shot before Avatar. In Titanic, presence was balanced by

the distanced view of technical and historical research, with the emotionally affective

love story offset and framed by a sober technical reconstruction of historical events

by emotionally disengaged characters who act as audience for that main narrative.

As Bruce Clarke has observed, the dichotomy of scientific observation and

construction on the one hand and participation on the other are not merely embedded

in the narrative of Avatar; as in Titanic, they also re-echo its production. But I wish to

put it differently. This production required a perfect composition of human and virtual

agents, with the main challenge, as in real life, being to design the most perfect

prosopon avatars: All the actors who played Naʼvi roles had to be bodily integrated in

the virtual environment. Designing these avatars was the opposite of designing a

persona avatar à la Second Life; the task was to widen the transmission channel

precisely for those aspects of embodied interaction that persona-based interaction

seeks to exclude. The essential things to capture were the involuntary, subliminal,

and embodied aspects of emotional interaction. Accordingly, a fairly unique aspect of

making this film was that the actors embodying Naʼvi characters had to learn the

skills of horse-riding, archery, free climbing, and so on. Even more important, they

had to learn to unify those skills for a convincing realization of certain techniques

impossible to realize on Earth – such as riding winged dinosaurs. As unifying skills is

completely different from composing things, this kind of blending or merging had to

take place as a consolidation of skills learned in different circumstances.

Likewise, given the conditions of operating in such a virtual world, acting ʻnaturallyʼ

seems nearly impossible, a predicament highlighted when considering the highly

artificial physical environment used for shooting the film. For the most part, the only

natural things ʻon stageʼ, so to speak, were the actors themselves, with their facially

and vocally embodied emotions traced by special cameras.17

This, finally, returns me to my central thesis about avatars and their special

configuration of the homme-machine. The prosopon avatar raises the question of

how to act naturally in a technological environment. Moreover, it steps aside from the

constructivist and humanist paradigm of bringing forth humans, focusing rather on the

phenomena of taking part in an environment. This, indeed, makes these avatars

categorically different from both cyborgs and persona avatars: Cyborgs bring forth

post-human forms of existence by deconstructing the dichotomy of nature and

17 If, in what has been said, I have not clearly distinguished Jake Sully or Grace Augustine from their respective avatars, it is for this very reason. Indeed, both the characters and their respective avatars were played by the same actors; furthermore, in the ongoing narrative of the film, they were embedded in the same dynamic and inhabiting the same planet. To put it differently would mean to state that their ‘minds’ would be transferred to their avatar ‘bodies’ – and thereby to accept the dichotomy that the film challenges whenever it can.

engineering in both a technical and a theoretical way, while persona avatars do so by

deconstructing the boundary between the real and the virtual and therefore allowing

for creatively (re)inventing persons. Prosopon avatars do not bring forth anything, but

entail physical participation in other worlds. Therefore they do not so much enhance

the creativeness of humans, or stage humans as something to be constructed or

created, than enhance (and require) the not-so-humanist task of skillful embodied

(inter)action, and allow for executing this task under virtual conditions.

Accordingly, the main challenge prosopon avatars pose is how to act naturally

in a technological environment. And this challenge easily translates into what may lie

at the base of Cameronʼs film: The challenge of how to inhabit a technologically

shaped world as a human body mostly shaped by evolution. The challenge presented

to the actors in Avatar can elaborate on this situation. As Stanislavski and others

have taught, it is very hard to act naturally if one does not feel naturally, because

feeling orients and guides embodied action. The task of actors, or of anyone

engaging in an unnatural setting, is often to feel and hence behave naturally in a

completely unreal and artificial environment. This is especially crucial for ensemble

work: Multiple actors have to establish a shared flow of action, invoking shared

emotions orienting embodied interaction; they must all inhabit the same (artificial)

world.

In the case of creating the performances in Avatar, the actors relied heavily on

this participatory form of interaction due to the absence of physical markers towards

which to direct their actions. In Cameronʼs movie, naturalness seems to reside in the

acquisition of skills and participatory ways of feeling – both for the professionals

enacting roles onscreen and for the characters they portray. Nature, in this sense, is

present not as issues to be put together, but as an emotional orientation intrinsic in

action and presence experiences. Avatar therefore is not “the first popular description

of what happens when modernist humans meet Gaia,” as Latour believes; it is about

how to inhabit the most modernist, virtualized, technicized world in a natural way, i.e.

while maintaining a feel for nature.

This focus makes prosopon avatars particularly interesting for todayʼs culture. In their

operation on principles of participatory composition, prosopon avatars invoke post-

evolutionist rather than post-human issues; instead of constructing and

deconstructing humans as humans, they focus upon the adaptation of human

animals in an engineered environment. To follow Cameronʼs clash of civilizations –

one sharing in and one exploiting nature – prosopon avatars raise the question of

how to survive as a natural body in an artificial environment, even as that

environment exploits the body (or at least its naturalness).

It is not by chance that Jake Sullyʼs human body is crippled. As a war veteran,

Jake is a victim of the human raceʼs exploitation of the human body. In working with

his Naʼvi avatar, he has to learn to bring the feelings and skills of a lost humanity

back into his limbs, reclaiming the joys of the body and its sensations through

embodied participation and sharedness – a theme present in all ʻback to natureʼ and

ʻnature versus technologyʼ narratives. Significantly, such relearning cannot be

accomplished solely through the kind of engineering technologies that caused the

damage in the first place; it requires bringing back the lost skills humans evolved out

of, skills of embodied interaction.

I agree completely with Latour that “[t]he lesson of the film […] is that

modernized and modernizing humans are not physically, psychologically,

scientifically, and emotionally equipped to survive on their planet.”18 Indeed, perhaps

humans – not unlike the other great apes on this planet – no longer fit quite so well

into the habitat we have constructed to empower our minds; sooner or later, our

bodies risk meeting the fate of a poorly adapted species. But I do not want to finish

with such a grand indictment of the current situation of humanity on Earth. To focus

on something more concrete and basic, possibly the most convincing aspect of

Avatar is that by the power of its special effects it raises the question of how to be

present, and perhaps even how to feel and act naturally, as a natural body in a

technical and virtual environment. Among all possible features of humans as a

maladapted species in a world extensively shaped by humanity itself, this question

picks up on the immobilization of bodies in front of screens, a critical side effect of

ʻhumanistʼ technology designed to empower the creativeness and constructiveness of

the human mind. Indeed, the virtualization of our experiences – even our existence –

has made it very difficult to inhabit the world with a natural body. Thus the question of

how to live naturally in a virtual world might also point to the fact that the evolutionary

18  Bruno Latour: An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”, in: New Literary History 41,3 (2010), pp 471-490; p 472.  

adaptation alone of our bodies cannot possibly match the speed of the developments

rendering them useless. It remains to be seen to what degree prosopon avatars can

remedy this situation. But even if their impact should remain minor, it can still be

argued that prosopon avatars enact their form of post-humanism in a more humane

way than other technologies.