Thesis Advisor: Amit S. Rai

July 2020

Abstract

Collective Avatar is an invocation for a shared practice towards a critical utopia in order to emancipate our selves from the exclusionary definition of the human. We will adopt the term avatar, not in its digital and present connotation, but look to its etymology rooted in Hindu philosophy. This will unfold the political and spiritual potentialities of the term by drifting us away from its present translation deeply linked to a superlinear dimension and its singular multiplicity. We will first analyze and confront the collective avatar (CA) with the digital avatar (DA) through their relationship with capital fetishism in order to enable further research into the definition of bodies as non-enclosing systems. We will propose demonic autopoiesis that embrace and redefine paranormality. The CA is against any entropic definition of time and matter as it embodies a perpetual becoming in relation.