From Grimes: "WarNymph is my digital avatar, aka my digital self. Everyone is living two lives: their digital life and their offline life. I want to untether my two lives from each other for mental-health purposes, haha. And also for fun.
When you see manipulated images on social media, it’s a middle world between real and synthetic. In games, people are living full, complex lives in preferable worlds and bodies.
The avatar allows us to play to the strengths of digital existence rather than be a human trying to navigate a world that isn’t made for us… For example, the digital body can age, die, respawn, change her face… There’s so much identity potential! My human self is much more limited. So there’s that simple, creative aspect.
I’m also pregnant. Having a digital body allows me to keep working throughout the later stages of my pregnancy, and after I have my baby, so I can spend more time with them. It’s hard for me to do photoshoots and fit into clothes at the moment, but WarNymph is here in your magazine promoting my album for me, haha. So another one of its functions is like… techno-feminism or something. A lot of my friends aren’t having babies because they’re worried about their careers, and we wanted to find a way to overcome this issue.
Another aspect of this is that we want to experiment in public and have the creative process be part of the art. Mac Boucher (who is my creative partner on this and handles the technical execution) and I have been wanting to do this for years, but we didn’t have the resources to compete with the more advanced avatars.
So eventually we decided that instead of making the perfect thing behind closed doors and debuting a finished product, you’ll see Version 1, Version 2, etc. She’ll start as a baby, age (she seems like she’s currently a teenager), die and come back better (as a new baby: Version 2). We’ll eventually figure out how to graduate to moving images and face-tracking and stuff. A big part of her story is that she’s in the lab.
We also wanted to develop a new species that would be ready for the next evolution in media. Something that can transport our identities to worlds that simply can’t exist in reality. We’re looking at the way gaming is radically changing the creative landscape and want to find a way to bridge into that world without being tethered to only one game. If our identities can be digitised, what else can be? We’re exploring a lot of the theoretical and technical ways we can evolve in this space." Source.
