In Art Avatar, Pia Myrvold presents a radical fusion of art, technology, and philosophy through an interactive installation that generates a digital double of the viewer — a living avatar. Shown at the Centre Pompidou in 2014, the project redefines the relationship between body, technology, and identity, transforming the exhibition space into a “virtual mirror” where the self becomes both subject and artifact.

​

Myrvold’s work engages deeply with philosophical questions of selfhood and perception. The installation creates what Michel Foucault called heterotopias — localized utopias of the future — where reality and digital fiction coexist. In an age of surveillance and global standardization, Art Avatar introduces a critical distance by presenting the viewer simultaneously as real body and utopian body, dissolving the boundaries between “Me here” and “Me elsewhere.”

​

Drawing on backgrounds in fashion, design, multimedia, and architecture, Myrvold subverts the traditional concept of the “avatar.” From its Sanskrit origin meaning “descent” or “incarnation,” the avatar becomes, in her work, a metaphysical experiment: the externalization of consciousness as form, light, and data. The project extends her earlier explorations in The Making of the Eye, turning observation itself into a collective and participatory act — we see ourselves seeing.

​

Art Avatar destabilizes Cartesian notions of the body as stable essence. Instead, it reveals identity as fluid, relational, and performative — what psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu described as a “Skin-Ego,” a sensory interface between interior and exterior worlds. Myrvold’s avatars respond to the viewer’s movement, changing color and form across a sensory carpet, creating a dialogue between physical presence, digital projection, and social experience.

​

Ultimately, the work becomes a collective performance of becoming — a participatory sculpture of living data. Through Art Avatar, Myrvold pioneers a new aesthetic of “the other within,” transforming the digital mirror into a space of shared transformation, where technology, art, and philosophy converge to reimagine what it means to exist in the virtual age.