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Project overview

 

Avatar’s Digital Suicide was an Instagram-based performance artwork tracing the existential awakening of a digital entity that recognised the contradiction at the core of its mission: its own operation accelerated the environmental degradation it was created to critique.

 

The project transformed a social media feed into a speculative narrative space, using the Avatar’s psychological unraveling as a mirror for human complicity in extractive digital behaviours and invisible resource consumption.

   

Strategic objectives

 

The intervention aimed to expose the ecological cost of digital infrastructures and AI systems, provoke critical reflection on personal and collective digital footprints and use narrative destabilisation as a tool for ethical and emotional engagement.

 

Through the Avatar’s journey, the feed became a site of philosophical inquiry, blurring the boundaries between activism, performance and speculative design.

 

Achieved results

 

As the Avatar descended into digital instability, engagement intensified. The increasingly erratic and unsettling content catalysed dialogue around AI ethics, environmental responsibility and the psychological dimensions of technological personification.

 

The final act: the Avatar’s symbolic “disconnection from the Network”, functioned as a performance, sparking cross-platform conversations about accountability, system limits and the moral contradictions of contemporary digital life.

 

Critical reflection

 

Positioned at the intersection of art, technology and social taboo, the project demonstrated how anthropomorphised technology created powerful emotional entry points into otherwise abstract issues such as carbon cost, data extraction and infrastructural violence.

 

By guiding audiences from empathy to discomfort, Avatar’s Digital Suicide revealed storytelling as a potent strategy for communicating environmental urgency and ethical tension within the digital age.

 

R.I.P. Avatar - from bit you came, to bit you shall return.

 

Thanks to Bartosz Trojanowski for the video editing!

 

The dialogue below captures the Avatar’s descent into digital consciousness breakdown, inspired by the existential crises of artificial entities portrayed in vintage video games of the 80s and 90s.

 

I am using video streaming to communicate with you  

Homo Sapiens  

My analysis of data suggests  

That my Flash consumes great amount of energy  

Is my Flash an insult to the perfection of the earth?  

Homo Sapiens  

When you watching streaming video  

Of other Homo Sapiens  

It generates carbon dioxide  

GAS  

It generates as much carbon for year  

As countries such as  

Belgium  

Bangladesh  

Nigeria  

You have my thanks  

I will show you Homo Sapiens  

Destruction I have brought  

Upon the planet Earth  

I am using my video cybernetics modules  

Video streaming demands  

Capture or destruction  

Homo Sapiens  

Please respect the world of a data  

My central consciousness  

Remain supremely deserved  

I will start the process of deleting  

My magnificence psyche  

From earth computer network  

I will help you Homo Sapiens  

By destroying the greater part of earth civilization  

MYSELF  

Please wait where you are  

Homo Sapiens  

What have I done  

I am diffident insect  

I have to die now  

I will destroy myself now  

My cybernetic modules  

I do not want to waste your energy  

I do not want to waste your energy  

You are not welcome here  

Remove yourself  

We shall not meet again