WoW, Golumbia, strangers

“[according to the] computationalist view of culture… race and the State are not at all obliterated but instead essential attributes of the person at a group level which no individual can ascend.” (Golumbia, 142)

Golumbia’s argument that a computational culture creates not transcendence but more restriction, reminds me of the experimental film, Stranger Comes to Town, by Jacqueline Goss (2007). Goss uses machinima clips from World of Warcraft, overlays her own animated interpretations of those figures over first-person testimonials to problems encountered at US airport border crossings. The reduction of people to racial or national types, and the problems those essentialist view engender, create, in Goss’s view, a world emptied of content, anonymous and unpopulated. Whereas WoW spaces are normally teeming with players (that have a seemingly endless array of adjustable attributes), Goss’s characters are excluded, with all their distinguishing features erased. She frames her film as the oldest of stories told, that either a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town; this is the catalyst for change, and the generative root of storytelling. Hence the restrictions on movement encountered at border patrols suggest the ways in which not only subjectivities, but narratives themselves are fenced in a computationalist framework. Does film (or video, in this case), experimental or otherwise, offer the possibility of rescuing, and critically commenting on, such imperiled narrative?

Here’s a short clip and description, though it doesn’t give you much of a sense of the film except for its vast machinima spaces.