Avatara

AVATARA não é um desenho animado. É um documentário sobre a subcultura da Internet que passa suas vidas imersas em um programa de bate-papo por voz em 3D chamado "Digitalspace Traveler". Através de uma série de 14 entrevistas, descobrimos a história, arte, identidades, lutas e emoções desta comunidade única da Internet que, desde 1996, dedicou a vida a este software.

''STATEMENT Digitalspace Traveler (originally OnLive! Traveler) is a voice-based VR chat program. Traveler was developed surprisingly early, from about 1993 - 1996. Upon its launch in 1996 there was a strong initial push towards making it mainstream, including spots on MTV (with avatar VJs) and NBC's Monday Night Football (with avatar football players). Within a year it was obvious however that Traveler would never find a commercial niche, and all corporate backing was withdrawn. Bruce Damer and designer/creator Steve DiPaola stepped in to save the code from deletion, and handed control over to the community of devoted users that had already formed. From then on, it was wholly operated, maintained, updated and extended by its users/inhabitants, once known as The Utopians.

Traveler's outstanding significance among the generation of avatar chat applications, such as ActiveWorlds, Cybertown, Palace, WorldsAway, Virtual Places, AlphaWorld and others, is made even clearer with the runaway popularity of Second Life and World of Warcraft. In Traveler, the user's avatar is normally a bodiless, floating head that performs a muppet-like lip-synch with the user's voice when he/she speaks through a microphone while holding down the [Ctrl] key on his/her PC. Traveler was/is not only aesthetically engrossing, it was also the site of a unique, and uniquely documentable, internet social phenomenon: it was home to a dedicated community of regular users (numbering between 40 - 70), some of whom seemed to do all of their human socialising through Traveler.

AVATARA is a 2003 document/documentary of Traveler and its resident community by writer Donato Mancini, media artist Jeremy Turner, and videographer Flick Harrison. The piece was filmed entirely "in-world", the world's first genuine machinima documentary.

As of 2009, the Traveler community has largely disbanded or emigrated into other chatware.''