Memoir/EPUB
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“Heart of an Avatar: A Preliminary Document of the Internet” is an eight chapter, GIF-illustrated book by avatar Eastyn Agrippa, with foreword by Luther Blissett—media-prankster, activist, and author of the novel "Q".
The book was produced during a 58-day "real game play" by Omsk Social Club in which eight people occupied the avatar Eastyn Agrippa and wrote in memoir as human, spirit, and multi-being. Over the course of the two months, each individual was sealed in a small apartment, living solely online with connection only to their community discord and the internet at-large.
This collective experience is now realized as 58 unique NFT memoirs, for each day they lived. Inside, Eastyn takes apart past and emergent theories surrounding the ontology of the avatar and net-culture. Through the genre of theory-fiction they lay out 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.
The first chapter is available on PW Magazine.
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
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
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
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
HEART OF AN AVATAR is a dream-like manifesto for collectively built worlds and online identities. — Trust
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? — ¥€$Si PERSE
"However, things got complicated. Eastyn, you are the living proof." — Luther Blissett
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Press
PW Magazine
Spike Magazine
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Omsk Social Club’s work is created between two lived worlds, one of life as we know it and the other of role play. These worlds bleed into one. That is where Omsk positions their speculative fictions, through these immersive installations they move into a territory they coined in 2017 called Real Game Play (RGP). Their work aims to induce states that could potentially be a fiction or a yet, unlived reality.
Omsk works closely with networks of viewers, everything is unique and unrehearsed. The living installations they create examine virtual egos, popular experiences and political phenomena. Allowing the works to become a dematerialized hybrid of modern-day culture alongside the participant's unique personal experiences. In the past, Omsk Social Club’s Real Game Play immersive environments have introduced landscapes and topics such as otherkin, rave culture, survivalism, catfishing, desire&sacrifice, positive trolling, algorithmic strategies and decentralized cryptocurrency.
They have exhibited across Europe in various institutions, galleries, theatres and off-sites such as Martin Gropius Bau, House of Electronic Kunst Basel, HKW, Berlin, Seventeen, London Volksbühne, Berlin, Stroom den Haag, Den Haag Netherlands and Light Art Space Berlin. They have been included in CTM Festival (2021), 34th Ljubljana Biennial (2021) 6th Athens Biennale (2018), Transmediale Festival (2019), The Influencers (2018) and Impakt Festival (2018). In 2021 they co-curated the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah.
