Louis Pratt’s work focuses on the effects technology has on society and sees the digital age as a pivot point in human history as significant as the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution. His bronze sculpture, “Avatar”, is one of his most successful conceptualizations of this idea. Aside from the lower legs and face, the figure is encased within geometric shapes, lending a sense of rigidity to what would otherwise be a gracefully feminine pose. More importantly, however, the shapes allude to the filtering of the figure through technological machinery, both metaphysically and literally. Pratt’s process involves manipulating an image on Photoshop and then generating it back into reality with a 3D printer. This figure, then, is both a product and a representation of technology’s effect on the physical form. The implication is that it, like us, is simultaneously part of the virtual and the physical world.
There is something sinister and almost monstrous about the way Pratt has reconfigured the limbs of his subject, perhaps hinting at where he stands on the issue. This underscores how much technology has changed society since the birth of the Internet in 1990, changes which to most, go unnoticed. The saying “can’t see the forest for the trees” comes to mind. Pratt omits the subject’s pupils also, imbuing the piece with an even stronger dissonance. It is as if, in the digital age, we have become more and more depersonalized. If the eyes are the window to the soul, then this figure stands for a soulless age, at least in Pratt’s eyes.
Words by Julius Kilerby
