CTCS 677: Techno-Cultures

final class meeting

2009-11-30T15:55:00.000-08:00

Our final class meeting will be 12/16 at 7 p.m. (until we're done, likely b/w 9-10ish.) I'm going to see if we can meet at IML's conference room, as it's a bit more festive than our classroom but has access to tech/a kitchen, etc.

I'll bring some kind of light meal and some wine. Feel free to supplement w/ wine/sweets if you like.

Cheers,
Tara

Visualizing Dinner

2009-11-26T16:07:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has posted a great visualization of the prevalence of various Thanksgiving dinner-related search terms (recipes, ingredients, etc), revealing state-by-state preferences for things like sweet potato casserole and pecan pie.

Happy holidays!

Databases and Distributed Narratives: Resources and Examples

2009-11-19T23:37:00.001-08:00

The following links provide a broad range of examples for those interested in both a general history of databases and information networks, and the role such technologies can play in the creation of fiction and other kinds of narratives.

Keep in mind that there's a fair amount of stuff in here that's only tangentially related to databases or distributed narratives per se -- but we feel that in the context of our readings, this extra material provides important context and flavour. Mmmm. And yes, that's flavour with a 'u'.

The list follows a general trajectory of antecedents --> early examples --> contemporary examples --> future directions.

Clay Shirky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Relational database - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ODP - Open Directory Project
dmoz.org - Site Info from Alexa
wikipedia.org - Site Info from Alexa
delicious/tags/plautus
Google Image Labeler
cyoa · animations
ryanTree.jpg (JPEG Image, 500x435 pixels)
Electronic Literature Organization
YouTube - iPhone App: Bloom by Brian Eno & Peter Chilvers
jeff watson » Blog Archive » Tenori-on
Quasimondo : Incubator - Experiments, Sketches and Computational Craft by Mario Klingemann
Lev Manovich - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Work of Jonathan Harris
The Whale Hunt / A storytelling experiment / by Jonathan Harris
Twistori
ATLAS experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Many Eyes
Watch MGMT "Electric Feel"
Queneau sonnets
Grafik Dynamo!
Year Zero Case Study
I Love Bees - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MIT Press Journals - The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning - Abstract

Lost Clip

2009-11-19T18:01:00.000-08:00

The Lost Archive- Holding narratives

2009-11-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

In our readings on archive and narrative for this week, I am intrigued by a number of possibilities and questions surrounding a sense of reader/viewer and the ability to spatially and temporally construct narratives. Jill Walker poses this possibility- this position concerning technology as fragmented, but in a way that opens up a construction of the personal/professional within the context of a daily life. Walker claims, “Yet perhaps they also point to a new kind of unity: a
unity where the time and space of the narrative are in sync with the time and
space of the reader.” In Steve Anderson’s discussion on Soft Cinema, this combination of database and narrative pose a similar construction of multiple “selves.” Rather than a centered or linear account, the network computer reveals (as well as obscures) this account of modern identity.

In constructing multiple identities and possibilities for understanding narratives, Marsha Kinder’s Labyrinth Project also reveals this possibility in selection and categorization as crucial elements to language, allowing for further interrogation of master narratives. I can’t help but reflect upon Tom Gunning’s talk at USC last week, and his discussion and research on moving images. He talked about much of his recent research in LA, showing a couple of example clips of thumb or flip books, playing with this idea of still images and the physicality involved in moving the image. One of the most striking elements to the clips involved the very straightforward close-up of a flipbook, from cover to cover. I am reminded of the materiality in covers. Perhaps this line of thought is getting away from this week’s readings, but I am very much wrapped up in the idea of covers as beginning and ending points. It is this attempt in capturing narratives (master narratives), and the physicality of holding a journal or book and flipping pages that makes me reflect upon discourses of unity and the user/reader’s/consumer’s investment.

I can’t help but think of Jem Cohen’s film Lost Book Found, which documents the filmmaker’s obsession with finding a journal on the streets of New York with lists upon lists of numbers, dates, names and places. The film essentially mediates on this question of lostness within an urban space, as well as the impossibility in reconstructing someone else’s obsessions and mental categorizations. In the filmmaker’s attempt to reconstruct a stranger’s place in New York City, the film also shows a layering and mapping, both in the understanding of New York as a Place, and the patterns in the filmmaker’s mind in unraveling this code, his own understanding of his role as an observer and dweller through a set of visual objects.

Database Readings

2009-11-18T14:13:00.001-08:00

Here are the web-accessible readings for this week.

Steve Anderson: Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database

Serial Consign: Interview with Kate Armstrong

Marsha Kinder et al, About the Labyrinth Project

Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media pp 194-207 (account req'd)

Jill Walker Rettberg: Distributed Narratives

Clay Shirky: ""Ontology is Overrated"

Jon Stewart and UCSC Grateful Dead Archivist

2009-11-15T16:33:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Want Ads - Grateful Dead Archivist

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Rick Prelinger

2009-11-13T12:57:00.000-08:00

Rick's website and Vectors' project

Excerpts:
MANIFESTO
1. Why add to the population of orphaned artworks?
2. Don't presume that new work improves on old
3. Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4. The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5. Dregs are the sweetest drink
6. And leftovers were spared for a reason
7. Actors don't get a fair shake the first time around, let's give them another
8. The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9. We reach the future only by roundabout means
10. As we wish to address the future, so the past desires to address us
11. Access to what's already happened is cheaper than access to what's happening now
12. Archives are justified by use
13. Make a quilt not an advertisement

FOUR STAGES OF AN ARCHIVISTS' CAREER
1. Each film is precious and unconditionally loved. Its discovery is a thrill; its existence a blessing.

2. Style surfaces. I hear the tone of a stentorian narrator, revel in saturated Kodachrome and the roundness of old cars, float on waves of elevator music. Looking across time I focus on appearance, enunciation, style and the illusion of simplicity.

3. Move beyond style to historicity. Films become pointers to historical contradictions, provocations and insights. Who made them? Who paid for them? For what purpose, and in what context? The documents speak to the events and practices that surrounded them and become aliases to a meta-archive.

4. Revert to essentials. An egg is just an egg. "When you said gum, I knew it was gum." Sandblast the bricks, grind off the accreted patina. Reuse historical images for their analogical content. Pretend this isn't the Spam factory in 1965; these men are just processing meat from pigs and people will eat it. Let the superstructure slough off, at least long enough to make a movie.

Amelie Hastie and collections

2009-11-13T10:59:00.000-08:00

Here's Amelie's book:
Cupboards of Curiosity

She also edited a special issue of Journal of Visual Culture on "The Object of Media Studies" that includes some of her thoughts on the ticket stub. [Journal of Visual Culture 2007; 6; 171]

Also, see Amelie's Vectors' project, "Objects of Media Studies" -- this is itself a collection but Amelie's thread of the piece is about ticket stubs

Prezi language

2009-11-13T10:14:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay in my lab post from last Friday. I came in a bit late, missing part of the initial talk/presentation by a guest speaker with the Engineering department at USC. Basically, he discussed the role of presentations in academia, specifically outlining the use of Power Point in Science related fields. The Q&A after the presentation posed some thoughtful responses and observations in looking at the role of performativity in presentations (especially Power Point work), and the comparisons in performance styles at the recent UCLA conference.

Steve’s portion of the workshop focused more so on alternative presenting programs, including Diigo, Vouvox, Slidesahre, Wordle and Prezi. The actual “hands-on” portion of the workshop involved a tutorial of Prezi and it’s basic format as a collection of research materials/ideas. Prezi has a free trial service, which I’ve been toying with over the past couple of days. There are also varying membership prices and options (which look kinda expensive). However, I can’t say that I completely understand the rhetoric involved in making a presentation with Prezi (lots of functions, different types of mapping). The tutorial allows you to play with text, moving your work along a grip (which can become a miniscule dot if you scroll out far enough- you also can “lose” it in this case). Perhaps in reflecting on this week’s readings and topic surrounding the archive and research, the use of a tool like Prezi opens up a rich visual discussion in both the active role of memory, and movement of objects in the audiences’ ability to receive and retain information. I’m curious as to what a “finished” presentation product would look like- perhaps I will have something to show soon enough.

the tools of collecting

2009-11-13T02:04:00.000-08:00

I’m going to shift my response to the tools of collection, largely because when I examined my own processes, I found that there was little that I made the effort to collect in any exhaustive or detail-oriented way. There have been periods where I kept an eye out for matchbooks, novelty magnets, floaty pens, and books of poetry, but by and large those interests have passed, or the collecting urgency, the archival desire, has mellowed out considerably. There is plenty that I sort through however, and even more that I neglect; I moved a few months ago and still have unpacked boxes piled up in my closet, and my email inbox, at this point in the semester, has gotten particularly bad, despite my best efforts to create ever more descriptive and narrow folders and subcategorizations.

But I’m interested in the area of tools of collection, what one needs in order to survey or maintain or even “use” a collection, be it some kind of music player, an eBay account, or a refined skill in a specialized area. I am a compulsive notetaker and carry with me a notebook everywhere I go –it’s necessarily blank, without lines, and small. And while it’s fairly heterogeneous as far as the kinds of things that go in there – lecture notes, shopping lists, messy film notes written in the dark, odd words or phrases I hear, particularly medical ones, messages written in big letters to be shown to my roommate while she’s talking on the phone—it’s not personal in the way that my actual journaling or writing is, which takes place only on my computer, nested away in a labyrinthine system of deliberately misnamed folders. But I like to think of my notebook as an alternate journal, something more “public,” though not with the intention of being seen; a kind of net that’s cast to collect all the words and ideas that I come across in the everyday. A bit more formally, i.e. on my laptop, I keep a list of all films that I ever watch, organized by year, and listing information such as who I saw the film with, and what venue I saw it in (this would suggest I am a huge cinephagus; I am not. I just have a poor memory). But these lists and little books, ordered chronologically, accessible only by me (as entry is limited by my handwriting legibility, even for me), become their own kind of archive, some physical substrate of ephemeral experience, a material memory. I rarely go back to my notes, but there’s something comforting in having them there, even if I can’t find what it is I’m looking for, or if my graphological inscrutability –my personal “code”– has locked me out entirely.

For me, one of the paradigmatic collector figures is, of course, Harry Smith, who was known for his wildly diverse inhabitations of different fields and material things, from string figures, recordings of Kiowa ceremonies, paper airplanes, and Ukrainian Easter eggs, to his own paintings, films, esoteric mysticism and his seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, which formed an archival backbone for the folk revival movement on its own terms. But one of the most interesting things about Smith, in my mind, was the depth at which he’d dive into an area, and then once he felt complete, the speed at which he’d abandon everything. There’s a new book out from the Getty that attempts to bring together Smith’s various collecting and collection-making impulses, but I wonder, if in the context of collecting tools, Smith’s own disposition, his own two hands and his inimitable mind, were the only throughline that could connect such an eccentric assortment. Certainly the collector is always present behind a collection (or maybe not always, but there is an implied direction that guides its changing parameters), but I know of no more extreme case than Smith, who used a variety of tools, and amassed many, very rich archives, but himself was the only connecting point that could link them.

Library of Comics

2009-11-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

Like my interest in soccer, cartoons and sketch comedy television programs, I inherited comic book collecting from my father. The issue to the right is the first comic that I had ever purchased, in November of 1990. As a ten year old with surplus income from a paper route, my father insisted that I find a wholesome hobby such as my brother's baseball card collecting, which I found inane. I continuously collected X-Men devoutly, along with other X-titles as well as Spider-Man, Batman, Punisher, Daredevil, and various others (only Marvel or DC-I suspected the other independent publishers were lame knock-offs, like shopping at JC Penny's or Payless Shoes), until around 1995, when I needed money for other things, and felt that comics were for kids. Later, in college, I would sporadically go to a comic book store and splurge on both current issues, as well as as many back-issues as I could afford, to fill in the last five years of story. Finally, in 2006, I decided that having a wholesome hobby was a good idea, and began subscribing to the x-titles again, and I currently receive 6 titles in the mail each month. My collection is currently contained within 3 large comic book boxes, 2 of which are in New York, thus splitting the location of my archive into 2 physical sites. Although I had previously rabidly collected back-issues, internet fan sites such as uncannyxmen.net have allowed me to catch up on the story without having to pay anything, although depriving me of possessing the physical object, as well as the visual pleasure of most of the art-work contained within the pages, as these sites tend to summarize the story into paragraphs, depriving the reader of the full experience and sensation of different artist's styles, colors and dialogue. I do not really hope to collect X-Men in its entirety, as I enjoy the feeling of being lost in the story line, and having to google names and places to figure out what is significant that I have missed. So as far as I see it, there are no real limits to my collection, but objectively I could collect every Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force and New Mutants comic ever published-the story was always more important to me than the physical objects. While there is a market for comics, and I'm sure a few of mine may be worth a bit of money, I have no real interest in exchanging them. Strangely, I at once could never throw them away, but also take very little care of preserving their integrity as art-objects or possible commodities to be traded in for money. As far as use value, I like to think that one day I will write a compelling paper about the Mojoverse, comics as political and social critique, or the rise and fall of Chris Claremont, but when it comes down to it, the narrative universe of X-Men has occupied my absent mind for so long that sometimes I just like to look at old comics again, allowing me to enter parallel universes and alternate time-lines, re-visiting sheets of the past which allow me to recollect my actual thoughts/sensations while I read the comics the first time. My archive of serialized comics allows me a path at once into my past and into the narrative universe of a group of people who are at once branded "gifted" and "cursed"-an allegory for both intellectuals and queers.

An Arab's Head

2009-11-12T21:23:00.000-08:00

Sekula's "The Body and the Archive" reminded me of my run-in with the French system of criminals' photographs a few summers ago. I had met a guy at a club whose name was Karim and who was from Algeria. It's been my experience that the easier he is to fetishize, the riskier it is to get involved. In this case I was proved right. He was completely drunk and so I drove his car to my place but never jotted down the license plate number. He might have put something on my drink or maybe I'm just trying to remember it that way so that I am not completely to blame for what happened.

Karim, who showed surprise at my showing surprise over the fact that he wasn't French, said "Look at my Arab head." Which reminded me of the biologization of prejudice against people from Northeastern Brazil. One wouldn't say "so and so looks like this" or "like that" or so so "is" this or that. One would, like Karim, refer to one's "head" as the evidence for one's inferior social status ("flat heads from the Northeast"). By the end of the night we had set a date for the following night and I fell asleep. When I woke up, several of my belongings were gone. And so was Karim and his head (no sexual pun intended). So I walked to the police station to report the crime. "Was he Arab?" was the first question the policeman asked me. Then he said he was going to have to do something very pointless, but that was the law, so he had to do it. This pointless thing was to show me photographs of previously booked criminals on a computer. He didn't even pay attention to my looking at the images, 99-percent of which were "Arab heads". "Can I get these guys' phone numbers? They are hot", I told the policeman. And he laughed, and said he had been at the club where I met Karim (but not because of him, "because of a friend who wanted to go.")

Why did the policeman ask me if the thief was Arab if almost all criminals in the archive was Arab? The "average-ness" conceals the crime, so what was he trying to confirm?

This inheritance of the criminal photographic archive struck me because the policeman announced it as fruitless even before I had a chance to access it and because, all photographs did look alike. I can see, then, the allure (Galton's Bertillon's...) of trying to discover the physical link among these Arab criminal bodies. And the probing and measuring, perhaps akin to the queer assessment of "str8 acting" evidence in online photographs (checking for a lack, a lack of signs of femininity, or "gayness"). And the alikeness -- in the French criminal photographs and in this queer search for seamless hetero-mimicry -- isn't borne out of anything inside the photograph, but out of the looker's own investment.

Punctum metro passes

2009-11-12T14:54:00.000-08:00

The timing for this particular assignment comes at a rather uncanny point in my own Ph.D. application process. I can’t help but think of this notion of “collection” and “materiality” in my own relationship to presenting a sort of archive of my academic and personal life. I went to a book talk the other day with Kaja Silverman on her new book Flesh of my Flesh. I’ve only had a chance to glance through the introduction, but some of the more memorable moments of her talk centered on this notion of self and her own relationship as a theorist and spectator/participant to her work. In her own search through the Berkeley Art History archives, Silverman also opened up a very “real” approach in having a personal stake in the materials and artists she has come in contact with. It’s a seemingly simple concept. However, I am constantly reminded of my “place” within a theoretical investigation, and this element of the personal in creating a space for my academic development.

So, I know the personal is deeply “looked down” upon in the world of academia or near past of academia, and I try not to be too much of an offender, but I felt the homework assignment allows for this space- this collection or rather embodiment of the personal (that’s why we blog, right?). So, here I am theorizing the personal.

I lived in Prague for a year after finishing up my undergrad work. I took very few pictures during my time there. More so, my actual “documentation” consisted of a journal, postcards, and receipts of my public transportation travels throughout city. Evoking the language of photography from Roland Barthes, perhaps the resistance of my own personal picture taking lay in this impossibility in understanding this notion of “punctum.” Barthes is able to “prick” or rather, feel this prick of the picture from his viewing position in relation to the image as an object. In many ways, the image transforms the notion of inanimate objects, to something felt alive and “experienced” in the flesh of the viewer/participant. Kaja Silverman goes into more detail about this position and specificity of photography within her book. Barthes poses to himself and addresses his mother through an essential question: “Did I recognize her?” In essence, Barthes asks this question in relation to his own being or pre-history on earth (his ability/inability in recognizing his mother before his own existence). It’s a strange thing being in the present position of the picture taker and consumer/observer. I realize Barthes notion of the “punctum” is always after-the-fact in a sense of both capturing a moment, and giving (or feeling) the details of the image as a product. In personalizing this question, did I or could I in fact, recognize myself as the documenter- a spectre of myself? Did I even “want” to recognize myself in this act of documentation? As an expat and English teacher? In a strange sense, holding those travel receipts, marked in one-day and week-long passes continues to evoke this stranger, and a stronger sense of self in my experience of moving through the passages of a city- my body riding the escalator, rubbing shoulders with “strangers”, the act of traveling between teaching venues/schools, and the constant unraveling my own forgetting. It’s not even the dates on the passes that remind of particular moments (which I could never figure out where the Metro Police looked in determining if the pass had in fact “expired”). It’s a similar sense of remembering in looking through my various English-language lessons, notes, student’s written work and drawings. I feel a strong sense of my once present state in laboring over lesson plans- at one time a currency in my own employability as an English instructor.

I am curious about this need, or rather, obsession with documentation. In our readings for the week, this notion of the archive and its linguistic roots in “secrecy” and privacy as described by Rolena Adorno. Adorno is more interested in a scholarly relationship between the University and the royal archive, including a layering and collection of knowledge. As with Lucas Hilderbrand’s text surrounding Youtube and cultural memory, there is also an underlying theme in renegotiating the bounds of an accessible internet site, and looking more closely as how privacy is accessed through a public domain.

The element of language becomes even more important in borrowing from Derrida this “quasi-illiteracy” of images with a textual analysis. This “in-between” space emerges (as discussed throughout this semester) in categorizing within the archive (and being able to effectively “search” through it). So, coming back to my own ideas around the archive and my time spent in Prague, I could never fully “collect” myself while living there (not to overly romanticize). I remember my cousin came to visit me while I was there and ended up making a “photo album” on facebook of the experience. I never managed to download one of my own, though. At the time, I didn’t think about it. It’s funny looking at the pictures now- I recognize landmarks (the Prague castle, Charles Bridge, Old Town area, the streets surrounding my neighborhood in Andel). I see my cousin and I, posed like many similar tourist pictures, occupying a sense of Prague.

There are visual markers, cues that cause me to reflect upon my time there, in that moment. It is also this inability in recognizing myself positioned within Prague. In many ways, I think back on my “unofficial” status as an undocumented worker. My language school paid me in cash once a month. No receipts. No documentation of my 60 plus hour workweeks. In many ways, like I’ve attempted to address earlier in this ramble of a post, my presence never could be fully recognized by the Czech government, including my own positioning in the sub-culture of English teachers in Prague. I never “belonged” and not that I desired or refused this sense of connection, but perhaps I could sense this transitory existence, my own replacement in an endless crop of expat English teachers.

So, hear I am left with dozens of metro receipts, all in various increments of Czech crowns. I can’t seem to throw them out. It’s my collection. Maybe the closest thing to remembering myself three years ago.

More fun at Machine Project

2009-11-12T09:02:00.000-08:00

Mignonette Game Kit: Soldering Workshop

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

12pm – 3pm

In this workshop, each participant will assemble their own Mignonette Game kit, and learn to solder in the process. The Mignonette kit is a perfect introduction to soldering and electronics, with challenges for intermediate skill levels too.
Taught by Rolf van Widenfelt, SF Bay Area engineer and co-designer of the Mignonette Game.

The Internet as Playground and Factory Conference

2009-11-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

Ways to follow an interesting conference kicking off in NYC:
The tweet tag is #IPF09. Play the conference Twitter game, designed by Local No. 12 (http://twitology.org/).

Program: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22379814/Program-IPF09

We will live stream one track of the conference. Tune in 11/13 and 11/14 10am to 5pm (EST). WNYC will record parts of the event and feature it on their website.
(http://streamingculture.parsons.edu/)

A video welcome letter is on Seesmic.tv to which you can respond

(http://seesmic.tv/threads/dzijUisaPo).

We are filming short video statements, "Voices from #IPF09"

(http://vimeo.com/user2103510/videos/sort:plays).    Major credit for that goes to Assal Ghawami!!

In memory of card catalogs....

2009-10-30T15:52:00.000-07:00

And to get us jumpstarted on weeks 4 + 5, if in the tone of nostalgia....

It's All in the Cards.

Bringing Sexy Bareback

2009-10-29T23:57:00.000-07:00

It strikes me that the reading this week, from McGlotten’s queerspace to Dean’s emphasis on the distinctly modern stranger in cruising, are oriented specifically toward gay male culture, and as Tewksbury notes, one that is predominantly white. I can’t help but wonder what kind of space is opened up for female sexuality and in particular, gay women, particularly as the couple of Craigslist ads I placed were for women seeking women. The theories certainly apply to or suggest ways in which female sexuality might adhere to or differ from the web-mediated encounters that are described, though the focus on male homosexual practices like cruising or barebacking, or in the case of Bersani, the sociality of gay male community, is, for me, dangerously close to assuming that these types of encounters are common to all gay people, female and male. Tewksbury is the most explicit in delimiting his gendered scope, though as a sociologist (I am presuming), this seems to be intrinsic to his methodology; theorists like Kaye, McGlotten, Bersani and Dean, to differing degrees, posit modes of self-representation, desire, and community formation that are implicitly male.

My own experience posting on Craiglist was somewhat uncomfortable, in that I had no intention of actually representing myself or my desires accurately, and for me this was an ethical concern. This may be in part because the first response I received, and admittedly this may have been a standard reply to Craigslist postings, provoked a massive guilt trip:

i just saw your craigslist ad you posted earlier today looking for some nsa fun. i really want to take you up on it...like right now :) problem is, i responded to a similiar ad last month and was supposed to meet up with a guy but later found out after that it was just some 12 year old kid who was playing a prank on craigslist. That was my first time trying to hookup with someone from craigslist and since then i have been really skepitcal about going through with this again. but after just seeing your ad, i want to try this with you (if your ad was legit) i am for real, so i hope you are as well. i just moved here a couple months ago from vermont....wow....what a difference.

I was reminded of McGlotten’s observation of the “contradictions of sexual publicity; bodies in circulation do not necessarily want to be known.” (76) He admits at one point, “I have to wonder why some participants try to protect their identity,” yet I couldn’t help but think that anonymity in a queer culture is of paramount importance, particularly given the stigmas still attached to revealing one’s own identity, e.g. closeted identities, or the near (or sometimes actually) faceless encounters in cruising. If the fantasy of the internet is disembodiment, there is still a logic of separating the face from the rest of the body, i.e. the genitals, that still operates in this manner.

I certainly did not want to be “known,” not on the level that I normally present myself in any case. (Perhaps the certainty of that statement needs to be interrogated more thoroughly; or is it enough to say I just wasn't in the mood?) Though I posted pictures, they were movie stills that seemed ambiguous enough to be taken as candid photographs of “me.” This too spoke to the authority of the photographic image that Kaye describes, how, taking after Barthes, “a person’s photograph, much more than actually able to represent reality, makes the viewer believe in its reality.” (168) The awkwardness I felt may have stemmed from the knowledge that the photographs I used, however “fake” or “inauthentic” (i.e. misrepresentative), still evoke a certain reality, or reality-effect. It is not the indexicality of Bazin, but a signifier for authenticity nonetheless, an implied statement of disclosure, which I was, in actuality, falsifying. Kaye remarks that virtual cross-dressing only works “to the extent that they are fooling, or making themselves invisible to that hegemony,” and yet my experience with it was a heightened sense of myself, that I was not who I said I was. That, to me, felt ethically dubious. (166) Part of this problem, additionally, stemmed from the frustration over Craigslist’s lack of options for what I might have been looking for: strict divisions between gender, not being able to find more bisexual ambiguity, or having to rely on conventions of casual sex when it came to “casual encounter.” Why is there not a space for something between “strictly platonic” and something more pointedly sexual? Something like a queerspace in McGlotten's formulation: “a space of threshold, as a betweenness that opens up?" (65) A way of figuring out those dynamics in the process of their unfolding, rather than ordering off a menu of options?

my favorite reply so far

2009-10-29T23:01:00.000-07:00

in response to an ad with the subject line "these boobs aren't real" (with a picture that certainly confirmed it), i received this reply (among many less imaginative ones):

"I disagree!!! If you can touch em...they're real!!!! =)"

Took me right back to Laura Marks and Touch.....

Computing HIV

2009-10-29T19:33:00.000-07:00

I thought this was interesting in light of how most of the readings describe how the computer facilitates that spread of HIV-in this case a supercomputer is being used to map HIV DNA in an attempt to understand how the virus mutates genetically. I wonder if similar technology could be used to track who infected whom, although I believe the virus begins to mutate even within one host. It poses questions of the ambivalent relationship between technology and public health, as in one instance computers can help spread the virus, and in another may work towards finding a vaccine, or additional forms of treatment.

Call and Response

2009-10-29T18:16:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the most interesting responses I got from the ads I posted. I posed as different genders, looking for different "things." I'm not posting their photos or email addresses, but if you are interested in any, contact me.

1. "hey im not the slightest bit gay and have never done this b4 but im as horny as horny can be! i live in encinitas if you are up for coming over here and must be discreet..."

2. "i am real, d/d free, respectful, educated, BAchelors degree in film production and a minor in business and psychology .

what would you like to know about me? my sexual interests are easy. i love sex. i am clean, i always use protection, unless requested not to. i can meet days only, but please dont hold that against me."

3. "my dick when from hard to soft at the thought that u might by a man."

4. "I DO LIKE MY ASS EATEN BALLS SUCKED DOUBLE B.J AND YES I GO 9 INCHES

DEEP IN ASSES, I DO FUCK SUB BOYS BUT ONLY WHEN A WOMAN IS INVOLVED AS
WELL "

5. "Some of us are always available. ;-) I'm off today and tomorrow, some of my guys work from home, so they're available too. I'm bi-curious, but not with my guys. Let's say if we meet you two and me I'm open to almost anything, but with my group I can do just a little bit. ;-)"

6. "im into getting you just have to be gentle. im a str8 dude, but i love the way cock feels"

7. "Would lov to hear You moan.....like masc guys out in public and sub bttm boy in the bedroom. That u?"

8. "I am honestly str8 but just curious and just want to get the curiosity out of the way...

No insertion into my mouth or ass... like i said, this is my first, and if i like, then maybe we'll break it in..."

9. "I am 6'4", 200 lbs, an aggressive top who appreciates the curves of a woman and the yearnings of a boy"

10. "really want to find a girl that i 'come home to' and find her blowing my friend. I get pissed and rape you both. nothing too rough. I fuck him in the ass hard and then rape your ass and slap you around for being such a slut. I have the friend, he's a tight indian kid about 5'7 155 lbs. "

11. "perfer rubber but raw only with cleaning tools, like disinfecting liquid and need to shower good.."

12." i never met a ts in real but saw many on the web and i am curious to see how meetingn one and talking to one in person "

13. "im str8 and top women normally but with a girl like u i prefer u too fuck me good nd be a top..although i can verse. raw or rubbers really depends on the vibe."

14. "so i am a str8 guy, who recently discovered he'd really like to suck some good cock... and what's better then a cock attached to a beautiful girl, right? nothing, i say, nothing is better."

15. "straight, slim latino guy here. I just want to suck a cock very badly but i don't like guys. "

16. "Im the type that if a woman gets involved in a mans conversation, she just needs to stay out of it because it aint her place to be involved in a mans circle or conversation. Im from Turkey and have my temper at times and not afraid to show it. Here is my picture and hope to hear from you."

17. "I'm not a fag and will only fuck something very passiable with tits and fat ass. "

18. "My gf is half black and seriously hot with insame sex appeal so you know that i have to represent.. hahaha shes no joke! So tell me all you want.."

19. "ill let a guy suck me, if u can prove d/d free raw not big on ass eating"

20. "I need a girl or $"

21. "I am clean and I top raw and bottom with condoms."

22. "I will eat a girls ass but not a guys...I will get fucked like I said,if the guys cool..but girls have to be present..."

23. "I want you to be my aunt that wants to fuck with me but i never knew...."

Cruising Bresani

2009-10-29T17:53:00.000-07:00

The film Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980) opens up an interesting dialogue with our readings this week, as well as the required sex ads on Craiglist, “looking for things,” as Diego put it. In the film, Frank Burns (Al Pacino) goes undercover in the New York S&M scene of late 70’s (pre AIDS) to catch a serial killer who has been preying on gay men. The victims, explains the police captain while detailing the operation to Burns, “were not in the mainstream of gay life. They were into heavy leather, S&M, a world unto itself.” Burns is sent out into the hedonistic scene as bait, to “cruise” the killer, as he matches the physical descriptions of the victims. Perhaps problematically, the film equates the act of cruising, or searching for an anonymous, casual sexual partner, with a radical underworld of leather, whips, public sex, and secret bars. The whole movie is available here, on Youtube, if you want to check it out (scroll through this guy's uploads, the film is there, broken into 14 segments). I highly recommend renting it though; it is one of my favorite films, despite stirring tons of controversy during its production and release for portraying gay men as wild, uninhibited, and dangerous.

Although more of the differences and comparisons between the film and our readings/homework can be drawn out at another time (perhaps in class if anyone else has seen the film), I thought Burns’ descent/ascent into this world was particularly relevant to the new ethics Bresani assigns to cruising. Quoting Foucault, Bresani discusses an asceticism of a homosexuality to come, “in other words, not in the sense of a morality of renunciation but as an exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, an to attain a certain mode of being” (20). This mode of ethics, as Bresani notes, contrasts to the typical queer response to the hetero-moral condemnation of cruising, S&M, and public sex, which has historically been to suggest that these practices are novel and/or claim that they are perfectly within the realms of decency. Yet asserting the civility of these acts for Bresani means implicitly accepting “homophobic morality” values and striking the potentiality of cruising as new dynamic of sociability. Bresani believes that cruising can become a dismissal of moral worthiness itself, creating a new group of people who evade archaic moral categories all together. In short, cruising demands a new set of ethics, an asceticism of the self where the self is left behind to a radical otherness, a mutual surrendering to otherness, a “moment we relate to that which transcends all relations” (22). Combining this “jouissance of otherness” with an ascetic, rather than masochistic (S&M) erasure of inter-subjectivity, leads to a new mutuality in sex and society, where the desire for the other’s desire is feasibly eradicated. This fascinating reading of an ethics to come definitely mirrors Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism which also attempted to free thought and humans from the constraints of transcendence and its results: judgment, clichés, common opinion, failures of thinking, etc.

It’s a stretch, but perhaps we can see Bresani in Burns from Cruising. I won’t spoil the film entirely, but as Burns gets deeper into his new mode of life, his identity begins to unravel, or perhaps Burns begin to view his life, his identity, as already unraveled, fractured, and unexplainable. His experiences expose a new ethics, a new group of people, gathering in the park at night, shirking all of the homophobic morality weighing down the rest of the city (notably, all of the characters in the film that are “proper” heterosexuals, Burn’s lieutenant, the other cops, etc., are enslaved to the red tape of their jobs and wear it on their leaden faces). The killer is re-inscribing this morality on the “cruisers,” a morality that Burns himself must uphold if he is to catch the killer, one that he has known all his life and will not know “appropriately” again.

Urban Loving Strangers

2009-10-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

I am interested in Tim Dean’s notion of cruising within a context of urban planning and the construction of a city/social way of life. Using Jane Jacob’s text, Dean constructs a re-negotiated site of urban modernity (relying also on Baudelaire and Whitman). In his examination of promiscuity, Dean begins his discussion surrounding the phrase “Why should strangers not be lovers?” This question resurfaces throughout his essay, opening up a terrain for further negotiating the possibility of the “Stranger” or “other” within the context of cruising as part of the fabric in urban safety and life.

Strangers make up cities (perhaps part of a modern/postmodern definition of a city?). Dean furthers this point by considering “erotic encounters” as a point or more specifically a “metaphor” in defining this notion of “otherness” (pg. 181). Thus, the pleasure of urban life or city life comes down to the principle of not only living next to and within a set of strangers, but also this possibility in contact (pleasure in contact). At this point in Dean’s argument, he goes on to reconstruct a personal example from his own life, meeting a homeless man on his way to the gym. He provides an interesting recollection of the encounter, noting the physical details of mapping and remapping a walk to a destination through a “short-cut” and social exchange between someone of an “other-ed” position. In a certain sense, it seems a bit indulgent to me (I don’t know if this is the right word here), but this example seems to fit so readily into Dean’s example of defining the “urban” poor as part of this invisibility in defining the stranger in urban life…I know this is digressing from this week’s topic, but Dean’s example made me think about the homeless man’s mapping of the city (after their departure from Gold’s Gym). Where did he go after this point? In a sense, the homeless man almost becomes this object of “otherness” that Dean is attempting to depart from…or perhaps, that is part of his point- this man becomes wrapped up into Dean’s understanding of the pleasures of contact.

This notion of urban mapping also connects very much to Leo Bersani’s “Sociability and Cruising” text. Bersani’s first line opens up with the idea of social composed of desire (pg. 9). I hope to discuss this text further in class (at least for my own personal understanding). One of the more striking lines comes near the conclusion of Bersani’s text, in his discussion of otherness. Bersani states, “The jouissance of otherness has as its pre-condition the stripping away of the self, a loss of all that gives us pleasure and pain in our negotiable exchanges with the world.” It is here where I think the center of both Dean and Bersani’s writings connect, opening up further discussion in regards to an urban-mapping of the other and carving out a human subject that can negotiate this inner/outer dynamic with the understanding of home and embodiment that re-configures the social stranger.

Constraint City- the Pain of Everyday life

2009-10-29T15:22:00.000-07:00

I recently came across this art/social project regarding a physical/emotional mapping of a city space (“literally”) onto the body. The participants in this project wore a corset, which allows for psycho-geographical writing and rewriting of the city. This project reminded me of the readings for this week, especially Tim Dean’s writing on “Cruising as a way of Life.” This notion of the pleasure-pain principle is quite apparent in the Constraint City project (even though the project doesn’t focus on a “sexualized” or queer space). I am curious as to how the programmers/artists for this project would conceptualize queer space in relation to public/private space, and the coding and negotiation of these spaces when approaching wireless networks/areas. How do we understand this “invisible architecture” that is supposedly transposed onto the body? Especially considering this notion of the stranger or “other” bodies? How is queer space re-negotiated in this context?

Cancelling cruising.

2009-10-29T14:45:00.000-07:00

While posting the post below my mailbox found 6 more emails from craigslist readers/practitioners. I think I'll erase the ad in an h or so.

Fast it is.

2009-10-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

Wow.

Posting as Asian Femme Fatale, it took not even 5min to get a response from http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html aka "kneel".

Pervasive, Perverse, Perennial

2009-10-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

I've actually seen the inside of a sex-based text-based MOO. I've a friend, who shall remain nameless, who invited me to take a look, and I was certainly curious. The experience was broadening to say the least. I learned, amongst other things, that 'water sports' does not mean having sex while water skiing.

Water sports were, in fact, on a huge list of pre-determined 'kinks' that you could toggle on your character, that could be accessed by anyone on the game who typed +kinks . It was considering good form to be comprehensive here, and while there was a large and comprehensive list of kinks, ranging from 'size queen' to 'big bodied' to 'knife play' to plain old 'vanilla', there was also the option of writing up your own custom kinks. Very liberating, one might assume.

But I found, from my fascinated investigations, that rather than there being a destruction of hierarchies and discrimination, what ended up happening is that the representations people used in this cyberpornographic space tended to emphasize classically racist/sexist/domination based relations. Black characters always had huge penises, improbably so. Women were generally 'sluts' or 'bimbos' or tight laced librarian types who could be forced into adopting one of the previous two roles. There was a hardwired system of power relations, with masters and slaves, and one's personal position a required characteristic or 'tag' that needed to be chosen and could not be altered without consent from the authorities running the game. In short, freeing up identities and symbols caused these identities and symbols to develop a sort of giganticism, become almost hyper-racist and hyper-sexist.

As such, I think that the optimism of cybersex is questioned rightly by the authors we've read for next class. Certainly these forms of sex are physically 'safe', and it is much better that these fantasies be played out in a consequence-free environment, there is something concerning, in my eyes, about the way that unmoored and unmediated symbols, left to play, in fact tend towards greater expressions of domination. It could be argued, and cogently so, that the fact that one can play, with two different characters, both a master and a slave, but the need to separate to two demands that they be considered mutually exclusive. Separations are maintained and even emphasized, and cyberspace becomes, rather than a frontier of freedom, a reinstantiation of those fantasmatic desires that structure relations of domination.

The Ballad of Gay Tony

2009-10-29T12:58:00.001-07:00

The latest of the Grand Theft Auto IV spin-off episodes:

Sadly, it doesn't appear that Tony's the protagonist, so there probably aren't any barebacking missions...

Tinker.Solder.Tap

2009-10-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.sarai.net/publications/occasional/tinker-solder-tap

(Free Download)

We live in a tumultuous media environment. There is widespread  confusion,
uncertainty and awe at the inventiveness of the thousands  of people in
media networks who innovate, copy, tinker, recycle,  produce, remix and
relay. The protagonists of Tinker.Solder.Tap bring  alive the ways in which
the relationship between life and the media  has been re-scripted in the
various neighbourhoods of our cities. The  story begins in the mid-80s,
when a man returns home with an object  called a VCR. The chain of effects
that follows transforms  irreversibly the social life of the neighbourhood
and its  reverberations can be felt all over the world.

Produced and Designed at the Sarai Media Lab

Text: Bhagwati Prasad
Graphics: Amitabh Kumar
Translation and Editing: Shveta Sarda
Additional Research: Rakesh Kumar Singh, Lokesh
Pencilling sequential comic pages: Raja Pocket Books (Raj Comics)
Design and Cover: Amitabh Kumar

Published by
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India
Tel: (+91) 11 2394 2199 Fax: (+91) 11 2394 3450
Email: dak@sarai.net
www.sarai.net
Delhi 2009

Any part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the prior
written permission of the publishers for educational and non-commercial
use. The authors  and publishers would, however, like to be informed.

This work is part of the project, ?Social and Material Life of Media
Piracy? of Sarai-CSDS and Alternative Law Forum (Bangalore) supported by
International  Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada .

ISBN 9788190585316
Published by the Director, CSDS.
Printed by Impress, New Delhi

Gonzalo Frasca @ IMD

2009-10-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

Please join us for a talk by Gonzalo Frasca, who is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Powerful Robot Games. His talk will describe a framework for understanding how play and games convey ideas through the use of rhetoric rather than rules.

Gonzalo Frasca is a game developer, researcher and entrepreneur, who lives in Montevideo, Uruguay. He co-founded the studio, Powerful Robot Games, in 2002 to build both commercial and experimental games. Their game for Cartoon Network reached over 13 million player accounts. They described it as "our biggest gaming success in our history".

One of their most popular indie projects is Newsgaming.com, a project mixing journalism with videogames. It received the Knight Foundation News Games Lifetime Achievement Award at the Games for Change 2009 conference.

Time: Wednesday, October 28, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

(USC IMD)

Madden Journals

2009-10-23T11:41:00.001-07:00

http://football-freaks.com/forums/index.php?showforum=43

For those who are interested.

Oh, and for an examination in fan culture, check fm-britain.co.uk for the best forums on Football Manager.

EA Sports Hockey Final

2009-10-23T11:32:00.001-07:00

Check out the EA Sports Hockey League cup final -- real people playing simulated hockey in real space after playing a simulated season via telepresence... With interviews between the periods that sound just like real hockey player interviews!

http://www.easports.com/media/play/feature-video/NHL09_EASHL_Finals#

Civilization: Quality of Life

2009-10-23T11:09:00.000-07:00

Speaking of procedural rhetoric, check out IMD grad student Ethan Kennerly's project, "Civilization IV: Quality of Life," a mod for the popular world-simming game:

"My Civ4 mod (a directed research with Peter Brinson) appeared at a conference "Games for Change" and a workshop "Logic and the Simulation of Interaction and Reasoning." Thank you, Tracy, for inviting me to demo at Games for Change. It's refreshing to meet fellow humanitarian developers!

About the mod: The original Civilization IV rewards imperialism through scoring the glory of the empire. I reprogrammed the game to score the health and happiness of the citizens. By adapting John Broome's extended quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), and responding to Derek Parfit's repugnant conclusions, I designed an ethical calculus that rewards restraint, diplomacy and art in Civilization IV. See the presentation and play the mod." (USC IMD)

Conference in San Diego

2009-10-23T10:27:00.000-07:00

This sounds relevant to our class.

Videogame- movie tie- ins...

2009-10-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvuB9CJr-HI

I was recently alerted to this videogame involving an Irishman living (and killing Nazis, of course) in Paris...It amazes me looking at this preview in connection with Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards...I don't think they're connected, but it's quite striking (timing wise) to see the obvious influence of film in presenting an image and narrative surrounding WWII France.

Baudrillard, Solomon, Empire

2009-10-22T22:26:00.001-07:00

Reading Baudrillard this time, it was striking to me how Baudrillard begins “Simulacra and Simulations” with a description of Borges’ cartography, wherein the detail of the map is thorough enough to cover the space of the territory. The metaphor is prescient for the application of Baudrillard’s theory to expansive gamespaces that would be developed later. Here the simulation is by nature totalizing, and not partial; to see its edges would be to locate the limits of its reproduction of the real. Simulation exceeds and envelopes representation (indeed Baudrillard frequently describes it in terms of circular, recursive imagery: “an uninterrupted circuit,” “exchanging in itself,” a “Moebius strip,” “two ends of a curved mirror”), which maintains an ontological distinction between the sign and the real, however much they are equivalent. Simulation, however, refuses to acknowledge their differences; it denies both. This is the totalizing logic of the simulation.

It is not until later in the essay that Baudrillard approaches to an “outside” to simulation, which is expressed most pointedly through its mourned absence, its historical departure. This, to me, is an interesting break in the Baudrillard’s somewhat exhausting rhetoric. He suggests: “The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.” In other words, Baudrillard reasserts the concrete materiality of real bodies and objects, and this is reaffirmed in the essays he wrote just a few years later, collected in the volume The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. There he critiqued the mediated nature of the Gulf War conflict, precisely the disembodied nature of the conflict, at least the way in which it was represented to the public at large.

Elsewhere he refers to a lost reality that, through its felt lack, is overcompensated through the production of industrial materials and “overdose[d]” political ideologies like fascism that assuage people of their “[m]elancholy for societies without power.” Thus the real exists, but only in phantom form. It is remembered as it perhaps never was (nostalgia), and we are numb to or unaware of its continued presence in physical form. It would counter the logic of a totality, of course, if one could truly see outside the simulacra; at the same time, however, the pressure of reality’s absence is still felt on an indeterminate outside, which might account for the increased militancy that is expressed at those margins: political scandal, pathology, nation (Disney), territory, war. These extremities are precisely where the simulation comes under the most pressure, because that is where it threatens to come undone: in these categories which are already unstable, constructed, and yet taken as real or natural.

*****

As I mentioned above, the cartographic quality of simulacra lends itself readily to videogames, and I wanted to briefly discuss a piece by experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon, who has recently been creating machinima films within the gamespace of the Grand Theft Auto series (I’m writing about these films for another class). This installation, Empire, recreates Warhol’s iconic film within the world of GTA IV’s Liberty City. I believe that when it was on view at the Wexner Center last year, the piece ran uninterrupted for a week (Warhol’s film runs eight and a half hours). To achieve Warhol’s same perspective, Solomon, through his avatar, had to steal a helicopter and then crash into the side of a building. Tellingly, his south-facing skyline is one that does not include the World Trade Center; neither does Warhol’s, since his film was completed in 1964, before the towers’ construction. Throughout the week-long projection, the physics generator within the game begin to loop, indicating a temporal limit to the game’s total (totalizing?) space. And like Baudrillard’s simulacra, the vision of New York presented in Empire is not real, though it still feels like it, particularly for the uncanny sense that “[s]omething has disappeared.” The trace of a real is affecting not despite its departure but precisely because it is phantasmatic.

Phil Solomon, Empire (2008)

Andy Warhol, Empire (1964)

war, simulations, matthew broderick

2009-10-22T17:15:00.001-07:00

Censoring and Imagining Medium Specificity

2009-10-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

In looking at both Gonzalo Fransca and Ken McAllister’s articles on game culture (“Studying the Game Complex” and “Simulation versus Narrative”), there are some critical parallels that emerge as far as game culture in social (and academic) discourse. I find this notion of “medium specificity” very much at work in both of these articles (perhaps used as more of a critique against a social backlash involving the creation of games operating within a certain system of aesthetic codes and social apparatus). Especially in Fransca’s article, he aligns his argument against this notion of “narrative” and “storytelling” stemming from the modes of literature and drama. Fransca claims, "My goal in this essay is to contribute to this discussion by offering more reasons as to why the storytelling model is not only an inaccurate one by also how it limits our understanding of the medium and our ability to create even more compelling games” (pg. 221). In this desire for more “compelling games” centered within a rhetoric of simulation, a language for understanding and researching video and computer-based game culture centers on a certain model of “behavior” or behavioral rules (pg. 223). McAllister takes more of a critical stance involving the ethics and social response elicited by videogames as part of a value system within society. In linking videogame culture with definitions surrounding the “popular” and “mass media,” McAllister sets a system in understanding the reception of videogames as part of a “visual metonymy” (pg. 14). Thus, opening up a critical response that attempts to understand videogame research as part of a larger unknown in the field of embodiment and Psychophysicolgical force (noting both “harmful” and “positive” effects).

Both articles also touch upon this notion of media response in the form of censorship and censoring bodies in defining videogames as a specific medium of cultural response (the headline focus on violence in this case). Whether focusing on media generated from the Columbine shootings- part of this narrative argument that both McAllister and Fransca are attempting to dispel- the fact that videogames are surrounded within a context of critical response (whether government officials to parent groups) opens up a line of critique extending to a number of various other media forms (especially the Motion picture industry). Fransca makes note of the issue surrounding videogames as a vehicle for speech (something the film industry went through in its formative years). In a sense, videogames have gone through much of what other arts have gone through in finding a placement within a societal framework of public opinion, and part of specific medium with effects that are conceptually different than that of a book, film or painting.

In a sense, I am also reminded of Jane Gaine’s article entitled “Political Mimesis.” The premise of her work stems from a documentary tradition in defining and finding social and aesthetic patterns in re-articulating a body response to images. Even though her argument is based in the “representational,” I think there are strong elements which connect to this idea of simulation and a critical response/studies conducted around this notion of the human body and the physical “effects” of playing/occupying a game world. Gaine’s discusses the footage from the Rodney King beatings as a primary example of this sort of “political mimesis” in the way people (especially those who “identified” with Rodney King- in South Central LA)- were physically and emotionally “moved” by the images to reproduce a rioting response. As part of the complexities of video and computer game culture, I wonder if this a helpful framework or notion in exploring a social response in playing games? Could a videogame create a situation- a type of response that moves people to physically react in “reality”? Or is this logic reducing videogames to a simple rhetoric of what is real vs. the imaginary world that the gamer occupies?

Predator drones and simulation

2009-10-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

Jane Mayer's recent New Yorker piece and NPR interview about the US military’s use of remote-controlled Predator drones draws an interesting parallel to this week's readings. Obviously, the object of a Predator mission (actually killing “enemies”) is drastically different than a video game that is entertainment-based, yet the two “simulated” forms not only illustrate how visual technologies have transformed warfare (and vice-versa), but also how these very technologies complicate political, ethical, and economical ideologies (again, vice-versa). For example, what becomes of human rights when killing enemies becomes at once more precise, furtive, and less treacherous to the humans “controlling” the Predator drones? Likewise, from the viewpoint of the military, how can the use of video game technologies, as a popular form of simulation, alleviate certain aspects of warfare (costs, magnitude, etc.)?

While reading “Simulation versus Narrative, ” I wondered how Gonzalo Frasca would classify war simulations with “real” consequences, in regard to the paidia/ludus dichotomy of simulations. In the article, Frasca challenges the notion that video games are extensions of representational narrative; rather, he argues, they function on a different rhetorical structure known as simulation. Whereas established representational media excel at “both descriptions of traits and sequences of events,” (223) or narrative, simulations permit manipulation and modifications and require a certain level of interactivity, opening video games (as structures of simulations) to chance and change. With its looser rules and open-ended structure, paidia simulations, like Sim City, is a game without a goal or end—playing for the sake of playing. Ludus simulation, on the other hand, has clear limitations and rules and is exemplified by traditional, narrative-based games like Mario Bros, Zelda, etc. The Predator drone, albeit not a typical video game but nonetheless a type of “simulation,” rejects Frasca’s dichotomy and the idea that narratives are totally divorced from simulations. As Frasca notes, “games are not free of ideological content,”(233) meaning that as cultural objects, games and the use of games arise out of contextual frameworks, the results of which can be viewed as certain “narratives” themselves. In the case of the drone, its use and “success” is dependent on larger ideological narratives that are the foundations for the nation/state, religion, and war in the first place. Its use as a “simulation” with severe consequences is precisely to perpetuate a narrative.

The use of Predator drones shows that video game technologies, or Frasca’s “simulations,” are not solely entertainment or educational vehicles. Rather, their practice and popularity in popular cultures can be capitalized on and used for devastating purposes. That is not to say games are responsible for the atrocities at Columbine or any other tragedy, but following Ken McAllister, they represent, literally and figuratively, an ideological struggle as “a medium through which these values are articulated and re-produced” (26).

Train

2009-10-20T10:03:00.001-07:00

Brenda Brathwaite's Train is a tabletop game, one of six that the veteran designer is pursuing in a series on difficult subjects.

Train's game surface is a window, some panes broken, with additional broken glass scattered atop the surface of the play area. Three railway tracks extend at oblique angles across the width of the window.

The object of the game is to load yellow people tokens into boxcars and to move them from one end of the track to the other. Players roll dice to add passengers and move trains forward, and they draw cards to execute other actions, such as switching tracks, damaging a train, and derailing. Terminus cards on each track reveal each train's destination at the end of the game: Auschwitz, or another Nazi concentration camp. (Gamasutra/Ian Bogost)

[This game was played at Indiecade -- I missed it but word has it the experience was quite intense...]

YouTube comments or lines from E.E. Cummings?

2009-10-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

a fun game. can you tell who wrote, "this i bad sorry to saY"? (via McSweeney's)

Game Week readings?

2009-10-19T16:27:00.000-07:00

Hey, Gamer dudes! Got readings for this week? Other assignments?

Nowcasting: video or audio available?

2009-10-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling like I missed a heck of a conference, but thankfully there are plenty of posts and tweets covering what went down there to give me a sense of what was discussed and where I can look to find out more. Like, for instance:

The #nowcasting hashtag on Twitter - a good stream of coverage from both attendees and presenters.

Liz Losh has written some very detailed blog posts about several of the presentations.

What I really want, though, is some video or audio. Anyone know of other places to look for coverage of the conference?

moms on the net!

2009-10-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

more maternal (body) stuff (from Everything Is Terrible):

Nowcasting Conference - LiveBlog!

2009-10-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

12:13 And with that Nowcasting Conference 2009 takes a break for lunch.

12:10 The critique is directed towards data as a model for directing humanistic research. But these models will be modified by the specificity of the individual. Drucker is challenging the holistic adoption of empirical knowledge for doing humanistic work in graph presentation and not the practice of consensual agreement of interpretation by humanists.

12:05 Great presentation from Drucker. Last Q + A before break.

12:00 Twitter: lulabrad How do we map the "human experience"? What is the terrain of psycho-geography that Drucker describes? #ctcs677

11:58 Addressing the problem of scale and reading (i.e. the need to move from a space of a page to file, folder, collection, archive). It doesn't need to be put into a structure to be moved through. Reading is performative and the process is transformative of the text.

11:50 Temporarily is relational and not standard and fixed. We need to look at affect. It phenomenological and experiential.

11:48 Twitter: lulabrad the mapping of subjectivity...ah, i'm reminded of our discussion on phenomenology from last week #ctcs677
itchybramble Drucker's humanistic ethics: rather than assuming it’s a given (data), it’s a taken (capta). #ctcs677

11:43 Drucker letting lose and throwing the gauntlet. The idea of data representing is problematic because it assumes form follows data. Data is a construct of empirical methods that suggests there is an existing phenomena that can be taken by mechanical means. Any metric of perception of any phenomena is according to an agenda. It assumes there are user independent. WRONG!

11:41 Twitter: DiegoSemerene "The humanities can never be grounded in certainty" #ctcs677

11:40 Change the perspective of entities of the object of knowledge to knowing of events and the interpretation of it.

11:40 Twitter: joshuams Finally got http://tinyurl.com/yzeohzc (Real Media) video stream working w/ a newer intel-mac friendly version of VLC. #ctcs677

11:36 The latest developments in digital humanities: from approaching the problems that arise from the digital in the humanities to the shift of creating humanities with and within the digital environment.

11:35 Before the conference heads out to lunch here is Johanna Drucker FROM DATA TO CAPTA: DIAGRAMMING INTERPRETATION

11:33 Despite that the presentation is over here is the wikipedia page for the Medium is the Massage.

11:30 Even with the massive success of Medium is the Massage, it didn't create the transformation and the graphic norms that were being experimented with did not happen. the more conventional models of publishing sustained afterward.

11:25 Very dense presentation from Schnapp. Q + A begins.

11:23 Twitter: lulubrad Massaging of messages initiates change surrounding identity and the public- the you. #ctcs677

11:17 Medium is the massage is a hybrid of new and older materials. The bulk of textual materials is reworked and the massaging projected shifts to the public and concludes by proposing the question "who are you with respects to the electronic age." Medium as the massage is a McLuhan mash-up by impacting the public impact by popularization repackaging and re-approriating McLuhan.

11:15 Twitter: lulubrad ...turning message into massage...#ctcs677

11:00 Schnapp on Jerome Agel - The book producer was not the traditional editor but rather like a music producer and involved in all phases of the creation of a book. "Book were hits and not bestsellers."

10:52 Future Shock

10:50 Onward to Jeffrey Schnapp MAKERS OF THE 1960S: QUENTIN FIORE + JEROME AGEL

10:42 Twitter: DiegoSemerene Paglen's "production of outer space" echoes Curtis Wong's World Wide Telescope project? http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx #ctcs677

10:40 It's a shame Paglin didn't get a chance address the legal framework that encases this issue. Definitely something to look further into.

10:38 During the Cold War and the 90s space was militarized but it was silently agreed that it would never be weaponized. Though there may be war from space there would never be a war spot in space. However, this has now drastically changed.

10:35 We are interrogating the symbolic issue of space travel that are absent in the presentation. Paglin thinks that's spectacle for the military. What defines the "now" are the current developments and approach politics has towards the GSO.

10:33 Fascinating presentation by Paglin. Now onto the Q + A.

10:30 SATCOM has dramatically altered the ways on how outer space is viewable. Defact military occupation of orbit. Unlike other sources of occupation, this is invisible, undetectable, and deniable. It represents the closing of a frontier.

10:25 Twitter: ironmanx28 Trevor Paglen is extending his work mapping terrestrial manifestations of the MIC into space #ctcs677

10:23 MiTEx was to inspect and deactivate satellites with the goal of making them look like these spacecraft had simply broken down. MiTEx was subtle, stealth and deniable. It has an informal sovereignty over the GSO. This is a new ideology the military has projected onto agendas concerning US presence in air and space.

10:15 The anxiety is a response to the perceived territorialization, military occupation, of the orbits from the origins of these broken and rogue satellites. Now onto MiTEx.

10:10 Paglin has a very interesting take on the idea of anxiety concerning this subject of satellites, their orbits, and their relation to actual human interaction.

10:08 The rogue satellite DSP-F23 is the trajectory of Paglin's presentation. For more information visit here.

10:00 For anyone interested in Trevor Paglin's work visit http://www.paglen.com His presentation THE OTHER NIGHT SKY: SECRET SATELLITES AND ‘GEOGRAPHIES’ OF ORBIT begins now.

9:58 Anne states she is largely influenced by Jay David Bolter's Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Second Edition, but she responds that this digital writing space is no longer about words and more about conditions and situations now.

9:53 Twitter: itchybramble never before considered the book as a time-based medium, e.g. its frozen temporality as opposed to the "nowness" of a website. #ctcs677

9:50 Anne Burdick is now taking Q + A.

9:50 More interesting however is Design speculative mode - is propostional, provocative, investigative, and optimistic.

9:46 Design is more than issues of more than representative but also it is operational. It can also be used to create and structural logics, schema, information hierarchy, cultural strategies, narrative structure. Design can re-contextualize, critic, and deconstruct.

9:38 Visualization of footnotes that also have no departure note.

9:34 Discussing notions of authorship, hypertext, collaboration, and mediation.

9:25 Anne is introducing newecologyofthings.net

9:20 Twitter: tmcphers i'm here (there?) virtually but the streaming hasn't started yet. are folks already talking? #ctcs677

9:20 Turning things over to Anne Burdick, DESIGNING KNOWLEDGE. The conference now begins.

9:18: not everything is digital humanities, but the digital humanities are about everything---> design theory + digital humanities = designed theory

9:15 Defining design theory and thinking about design in all its manifestations: human centric, solution-oriented, and technical. Now moving on to the digital humanities...

9:10 Defining Nowcasting as defined by Rivka Galchen. There is more data points to get a fix for the present than trying to forecast the future. Now to combine that with design theory...

9:05 Introductions for Nowcasting Conference: Design Theory + Digital Humanities 2009 begins.

Nowcasting

2009-10-15T15:26:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow. UCLA. Info here.

Kiss and Tweet

2009-10-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

Apparently 40-percent of people (i.e. Americans) under 35 tweet/text/check-Facebook while driving. And 36 percent use new media as a kind of post-coital ritual of dissemination, right after sex. Men (i.e. socially heterosexual males) are twice as likely to spread "the news" than women (i.e. straight biological women). The website IJustMadeLove.com is an archive for people around the world (i.e. mostly Americans) to upload when/where they had sex and what positions they engaged in. If one were to read the site's interactive map at face value, one would conclude that no one has had sex in Botswana or Zambia for the past 24 hours. Ironically, 23.9-percent of Botswana inhabitants and 15-percent of Zambians are HIV-positive. With barebacking running rampant in queer circles and always already normalized in straight circles, could we envision a IJustSeroConverted.com? Is consequence also Tweetable, or just immediate action?

Did You Know...

2009-10-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

... that October is not just National Coming Out Month but also Cybersecurity Awareness Month? Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, in an attempt to commemorate the latter, stopped by the Cyber Crimes Center in suburban Virginia this week. The 12-year-old center, known as C3, mostly combats online child pornography, but also money laundering, arms trafficking and fraud. C3 also buys a lot of video games, because apparently Play Station 3s have a great capacity "for mathematical calculations and generating numbers, which makes them cost-efficient password-breakers". The game consoles are connected to servers called "decryption silos". In perhaps unrelated news Joy Behar wonders if Secretary Napolitano is gay, to which sex columnist Dan Savage answers "I haven't slept with her."

Digital, Watch Your Back?

2009-10-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

Polaroid cameras and film (color and black-and-white) will make a comeback in 2010. The 1948 instant photography invention will be relaunched next year by The Impossible Project and Polapremium. The Huffington Post just ran the news along with a fun feature ranking non-digital objects we miss the most, including pens: "Remember the day writing didn't mean typing? ... Not really!".

In the meantime, Brazilian print newspapers are celebrating a RISE of 12 percent in circulation. Brazil may be the exception that proves the rule (of the demise of print media), as it only recently saw the proliferation of populist and sensationalist free dailies distributed in metro stations and other public spaces. But for a lot of what used to be called "the third world" this may be true: Internet connections are still slow, hardware is still expensive, driving a very very small percentage of the population to produce and consume most of what is "used" online. Plus, is it perverse or even more necessary to think of "digital literacy" in places where a great part of the population is illiterate in general (many Brazilians "sign" their Government-issued I.D.s using their fingerprints because they don't know how to sign their names)? About 15-percent of Brazilians, 20-percent of Hondurans, 30-percent of Egyptians, 40-percent of Indians, 61-percent of Senegalese and 76-percent of Malians are 100-percent illiterate. How to make sense of the need to learn code and the need to learn how to spell one's first name?

Oh, and Miley Cyrus quit Twitter citing excessive self-exposure!

OVERHEARD

2009-10-13T15:50:00.000-07:00

"HTML isn't even code."

shouted by a handful of students at the Zemeckis Center when someone suggested HTML's status as code. Not that Tara's husbands hadn't already told us that. But here the tone seemed tinged with "Are you kidding me?" astonishment or "HTML is sooo not code."

Meggy Jr RGB

2009-10-12T11:02:00.001-07:00

Perhaps we need one of these for the games week....?

Doing, Re-doing, Un-doing

2009-10-09T23:01:00.000-07:00

How can we speak about embodiment without speaking of Louise Bourgeois? The sculpture work speaks for itself, but in thinking about reproduction, the digital and the haptic it's interesting to think of her installation called "I do, I re-do, I un-do" (2000), which also became a theater play that explored this notion of constant morphing. In the Tate Modern installation the visitors (users?) were invited to climb staircases to platforms, which could be "stages for intimate and revelatory encounters between strangers and friends alike" .

This first photo below I snapped not because of the Bourgeois' artwork itself but because the notion that a mother would drop off her 9-year-old alone at the Centre Pompidou and tell him to "meet her later" seemed beautiful and urgent. Maybe something Tara might do, even if Chuck E. Cheese is scholarship too.

Reverse Astroturfing?

2009-10-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

with the Yes Men...

The WoW Pod

2009-10-09T09:09:00.000-07:00

Artist Cati Vaucelle's WoW Pod -- "an immersive architectural solution for the advanced WoW (World of Warcraft) player that provides and anticipates all life needs.

Inside, the gamer finds him/herself comfortable seated in front of the computer screen with easy-to-reach water, pre-packaged food, and a toilet conveniently placed underneath his/her custom-built throne.

When hungry, the gamer selects a food item (‘Crunchy Spider Surprise’, ‘Beer Basted Ribs’, etc.) and a seasoning pack. By scanning in the food items, the video game physically adjusts a hot plate to cook the item for the correct amount of time. The virtual character then jubilantly announces the status of the meal to both the gamer and the other individuals playing online: “Vorcon’s meal is about to be done!” “Better eat the ribs while they’re hot!” etc.

When the food is ready, the system automatically puts the character in AFK (‘Away From Keyboard’) mode to provide the gamer a moment to eat. When the player resumes playing, he/she might just discover his/her character’s behavior is affected by the food consumed in real life — sluggish from overeating or alternately exuberant and energetic.

The exterior of the WoW Pod mimics the look of authentic WOW architectural structures, whose swaths of flat, pixellated surfaces digitally recreate the built environment of an imagined past. But upon crossing the threshold and entering into the WOW Pod’s interior, the player finds the digitized look actually becomes the real life experience that World of Warcraft simulates. (Cati Vaucelle)

virtual white house

2009-10-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

thinking of wayfinding and relationality, what fantasies of civic engagement are scaffolded here?

a bit more on american apparel

2009-10-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

some context on why i'm having a hard time taking dov seriously....

and another. And for fun.

dance, bad mothers, remash

2009-10-08T23:51:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to post a quick link to the Martha Graham Dance Company Clytemnestra ReMash Challenge, which was a contest held earlier this year to encourage people to submit video dance reinterpretations of the classic 1950s Graham ballet, Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra, of course, is one of the worst mothers of ancient Greek tragedy: scheming against her husband, sleeping with his enemy, and eventually murdering him. She also got her due when her outraged son, Orestes, decided to avenge his father's death and commit matricide. With Clytemnestra, motherhood and the logic of generational reproduction is disrupted; rather than being the catalyst for enlarging the family, Clytemnestra is responsible for making it smaller.

It seems that this notion of remaking or remashing* the dance, taking it out of the hands of professional dancers and into the general public by encouraging new interpretations (making the Martha Graham company act as viewers rather than performers), in some ways relates to the inverted motherhood of Clytemnestra, and it's interesting that the Internet would be solicited as the medium by which this process occurs.

On an unrelated note, motherhood figured prominently on last week's episode of Dollhouse (which is such a great, great show!). I won't go too deep into the show's premise here, but it's enough to know that the show features a group of people who are regularly "imprinted" with other personalities, for varying ends. The imprint of a "mother" persona this week caused one of the most deepest and lasting impressions, because this particular imprint affected not only the mind, but caused the recipient to begin lactating. So motherhood here, or the bond between mother and baby, is figured in this show, at least, as the most profound "identity" that can be acquired, one that is specifically enacted through the body against or autonomously of the mind (the episode is entitled "Instinct").

*William Safire was baffled by the use of the word remash. From the Times, Feb 15, 2009: "In re re-mash: This could be a remix of a remix, or a remix of a mashup or a mash-up of a remix; it seems to be a coinage in process. The word was disseminated worldwide in January 2009 in an AP article by Verena Dobnik: "The Martha Graham Dance Company is launching a global competition challenging anyone who's cybersavvy" to enter "the Clytemnestra ReMash Challenge." To interest a new generation in a cultural classic, contestants are invited to create four-minute online videos comparing the vengeful Greek mythical heroine to a present-day celebrity. The contest submissions are to creatively transform short video dance excerpts into a ReMash online spot. The intent is to call the attention of today's cutting edge to an art form they might otherwise overlook by capitalizing on, and perhaps satirizing, the current dash to mash."

Mothers and Daughters, Mother-Daughters

2009-10-08T23:00:00.000-07:00

When Laura Marks argues haptic cinema as always erotic -- as it puts "the object into question" and pulls the viewer "too close to see properly" -- she likens it to a child's gradual realization of separateness from its mother. This relationship of "perception of alterity" (and the problematics of its refusal) is present in Maud Mannoni's work on the "backwards child": the child who believes she is an extension of her mother's body for "too long". This belief of non-autonomy (material continuity) is created by both parent and child in a (ultimately unhealthy) partnership work of subjectivation and estrangement, identification and immersion, that also recalls the dialogic relationship between viewer and (haptic) image. It's true that the backwardness of this child who refuses autonomy via an impression of material extension (collapsing self and other) is most obvious, at least in Mannoni's work, in autistic and mentally disabled children. When the mother takes advantage of the pathological vulnerability of her child to exacerbate the child's condition so that it embodies the mother's own anxieties and lack. Yet its logic is also pertinent in thinking about 'queer' children in general and queer bodies, which is the kind of body "the digital" has, according to Marks.

This question of "where does my body begin and where does my mother's body end?", I suppose a universal "stage" of infancy, reminds me of Gregor Podgorski's photographic series "Mères & Filles", which features images of mother and daughters' naked bodies interacting with each other. In a gallery space the work is accompanied by verbal accounts of the mothers and daughters recounting the experience of being captured "together" in the same frame. The theme of "mirror, mirror" is constant, the uncanny sense of "a(n)other me" (a "me" resembling the past?) for the mother and the sense of staring at the materialized future for the daughter ("I will look like her"). Which seems to link reproduction and continuity to a kind of database of memories and expectations that get passed on from generation to generation. A kind of archive inevitably psychosomatized into subjects that can only "be" in this constant negotiation between autonomous, discrete personhood and a continued embodied history that one just cannot "shake off" or disavow.

Don't Worry Vivian, the World is Really Real

2009-10-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

I agree with Vivian Sobchack that "within the dominant cultural and techno-logic of the electronic there are those out there who prefer the simulated body and a virtual world..." and that these people are, well, basically nuts. The nanotech immortality fantasies of Ray Kurzweil et al notwithstanding, I think this perspective is increasingly a minority one, and I can't accept that there are many serious people out there who would argue for a completely disembodied, brain-in-a-vat/brain-in-the-machine cyberfuture. Indeed, I believe such thoughts basically emerge from an early wave of naive techno-utopianism and catastrophe theory, and have been propagated largely via non-technical and somewhat dim-witted (vaguely new age, often times stoner burnout) quarters. It all smacks of mediocre 50s sci-fi and its derivatives in Scientology and other tech/alien cult manifestations, and yet Sobchack talks about it as if this motive is at the dark heart of our culture.

All this is to say that the whole argument in "The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic 'Presence'" is a bit of a straw-man kind of thing. Yes, definitely -- "an insubstantial electronic presence can ignore [all the] ills the flesh is heir to outside the image and the datascape," and that would suck, but are we really moving deeper into the screen and disembodiment, full stop, end of story? Sobchack says yes, and I can understand how she got there.

At the time of her writing, the notion that we (or at least those of us who will be able to afford it) are all going to live our futures through our brainstems in an all-encompassing, "jacked-in" Virtual Reality was at its zenith, particularly in popular culture. The fear was that people would become so wrapped up in their disembodied virtual existences (foisted upon them by their robot overlords) that they would fail to notice that the were, phenomenologically speaking, sitting in a tub of goo far away from the site of their action. But while the Matrix films provided the culture with an outlet for various anxieties about technology, identity and control, they were, at bottom, kind of vacant, semi-obvious entertainments that recycled ideas and story figures that have been around since the 50s. Their cause was putatively a noble one, but the films themselves were little more than the pop finales to the initial gasps of fear and anxiety that accompanied the birth of "the electronic."

I would argue that our future can't be plotted on a phenomenological continuum that has "embodied" at one end and "disembodied" at the other. Blade Runner and the Matrix trilogy tell us more about the fears and conceits of the early 1980s and late 1990s than they do about the future we are actually confronting in the here and now. And yes, I know -- sure, there's something to be harvested there about the "techno-logic" of late capitalism and of course, yes, it's all valuable, all of it. But Sobchack spends a lot of intellectual capital worrying about the phenomenological effects of a theoretical reality that increasingly bears little resemblence to what's actually happening on the ground. No one outside of the most moronic and outmoded subcultures of misguided paranoid technoenthusiasm uses the words "meat" or "wetware" to refer to their bodies. Indeed, highly embodied cultural manifestations like DIY, networked public play and mobility are arguably emerging as the dominant paradigms. While screens continue to proliferate, they are arguably becoming less central to our "lifeworld" (while computation nonetheless continues its ascent behind the scenes). The once easily-drawn line between the Virtual and the Real is now revealed to be a grand fallacy, a product of the very fears and ignorances that produced Sobchack's essay in the first place.

Put away Neuromancer and pick up Pattern Recognition or Spook Country. Blade Runner and La Jetee are great -- so is Denno Coil.

Performing Results…err…accuracy

2009-10-08T18:48:00.001-07:00

In response to Mei’s suggestion in looking at the maternal body and technology, I couldn’t help but find a plethora of on-line pregnancy tests. Basically, you type in your name, and the test (through the magic workings of your home computer) analyses your body composition in detecting pregnancy…an interesting idea that goes along with much of Sobchack’s and Haraway’s readings for tomorrow (the website makes sure to let you know that it’s all a joke, naturally). In this language of “accuracy” embedded around pregnancy, I am curious as to how the physicality (or indexicality) of pregnancy and the maternal body will be further reduced? What will become the new “accurate” way of detecting pregnancy? The website also offers a disclaimer:

Our results are 100% guaranteed. Please note we only guarantee that you'll get a result, not that the results will be accurate. http://www.thepregnancytester.com/

In this site’s obvious self-awareness at online scams and hyper-obsessive rhetoric surrounding the indexicality and “validity” of pregnancy- the language of “results” returns to this discussion of the “real” and the culture surrounding the internal conditions of performing results through the “magic” of the computer. Again, how do we understand this idea of “result” in relation to the maternal and pre-maternal body? How do we also understand the maternal body within the framework of the at-home test (vs. the office/hospital test)?

There are also a number of online games- one involving a condom deflecting incoming sperm. Again, in this sort of online hetero-normative “joke” culture, the female parts become wrapped up in a red egg (upon losing the game, it is the woman’s voice that you hear cry out in finding out that she is pregnant- bodiless, of course). I am curious about the “popularity” of this game and “who” plays them (mainly males?), as well as the “effect” of reducing the body into parts and the physical process involved in the viewer’s “clicking” of the condom to “block” the sperm. The game never rises above the level (or awareness) of treating the consequences of unprotected sex much like an “actual” game, in which the “heterosexual” male is let “off the hook.” It revels in its obvious offensiveness (in which you can read a number of user comments).

http://www.gtds.net/play-game.php?gt=Pregnancy

Performing Results…err…accuracy

2009-10-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

Our results are 100% guaranteed. Please note we only guarantee that you'll get a result, not that the results will be accurate. http://www.thepregnancytester.com/

http://www.gtds.net/play-game.php?gt=Pregnancy

bodies! im not an animal!

2009-10-08T18:24:00.000-07:00

Our readings on embodiment return us, once again, to a question that haunts our respective disciplines (and one that I am particularly interested in): what becomes of subjectivity and identity in a digital age? An overreaching premise—practically now a given—is that perceptions of ourselves and the world have dramatically shifted, morphed, and transformed in response to our technological context, and in doing so, bodies and worlds come to resemble the forms and “materiality” of the techno-climate. This technological determinism infects the macro and the micro, from culture to bodies, from social progress and history to online avatars and makeovers. In both Vivian Sobchak’s chapter and Laura Marks’ works there seems to be a reticent thread of technological determinism combined with a more explicit and pronounced reluctance to fully accept such a reductive theory of history. Specifically, in Marks’ “Video’s Body, Analog and Digital” she notes: “If digital video can be thought to have a body, it is a strikingly queer body, in the sense that queer theory uncouples the living body from any essence of gender, sexuality, or other way to be grounded in the ontology of sexual difference…digital video reflects a voluntaristic choice to have this kind of body, for now” (152). In Mark’s terms, digital video, and moreover digital technology, offers a type of political neutrality that enables a choice of body, seemingly outside of any sort of power structure or agency. However in “Immanence Online,” Marks upbraids the largely commercial and popular notion that the virtual is an immaterial, transcendent space, capable of delivering a utopic future to come, but always just out of reach. In these two works, digital technologies are shown to be uncoupling and material, a potential virtual body and merely mortal—in essence, undetermined, perhaps spectral.

Sobchack underscores her resistance to a circumscribed technological determinism by way of an epigraph from Heidegger: “The essence of technology is nothing technological’ (135). Technology is never developed in a neutral context for an unbiased utilization; rather it is a product of certain political, economic, and cultural milieus. Following Sobchack, visual technological developments like photography, the cinema, and what she labels the “electric” bring about “…a specific perceptual revolution within culture and the subject” (140). These perceptual revolutions and visual innovations are indicative of the cultural shifts in perception and representation, from realism to modernism and on to postmodernism; they are more a socially determined by-prouduct and “…less as a technological essence”(141). Yet when Sobchack dives into her discussion of the electric, we again notice the terms “nonlinearity,” “discontinuity,” and “immateriality” being utilized to describe the rupture of visuality in digital landscape (instead of re-typing rather long quotes, please visit pages 155-157). Within and with the electric, the self matches Jameson’s post-capital and postmodern culture: “[s]ubjectivity is at once decentered, dispersed, and completely extroverted…”(159). In sum, the subject morphs to match the technology.

Returning to our haunting question, I am interested in some of the assumptions that are involved in post-body, post-identity theories of the “digital self.” In addition to questioning both authors lack of acknowledging the digital divide, I am incredulous towards presupposing a pre/post body and accepting technology as the agent for completely shifting and uprooting the self—as if there was a “self” or stable “body” to manipulate in the first place. Does the idea of disembodiment reify ideas of a singular self? If Golumbia, Galloway, and Berry have taught us anything it is the importance of considering how a fractured and decentered self in the digital landscape lends itself to certain commercial interests and niche marketing. Perhaps this novel way of being in the electric world becomes, following Deleuze, a monetized cliché—one made and propagated by commercial technology as “…floating images, these anonymous clichés, which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one of use and constitute his internal world, so that everyone posses only psychic clichés by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt, being himself a cliché among the other in the world which surrounds him” (Cinema I 208-9).

Lost in the Net

2009-10-08T14:06:00.000-07:00

In Sobcheck's discussion of 'getting lost' I was immediately left wondering whether or not the uncanny experience of loss, the loss of identity and selfhood, was possible in an internet space. From my experience, being 'lost' in the internet is much more of the first order of being lost, the one she sort of subordinates as an experience, the desire to 'find' something but being unable to reach it. This is brought into view pretty neatly by the frustration I feel when I can't find the page/source I'm looking for, when the internet resists my attempts to implement it. It's not a true powerless feeling, it's a refusal not a 'loss' proper, certainly not a loss of ground, since I'm still in my seat, grounded spatially, and I can always turn away in disgust and defeat, or I can always reload my 'homepage' with the click of a interface button.

Body seems like this anchor point of promised return when surfing the 'net. In cyberpunk fiction, the fact of the body remains a problem that is difficult to solve. It's the thing you want to transcend, but also the sanctuary to which you can always return (or hope you can return to). It takes on, in this role, a sort of maternal role, a womb to which our 'free mind' both wishes to return and wishes to disown in favor of the realm of code and pure, masculine reason. This is, of course, a very problematic reading, since it assumes the subject in question is a subject of male desire, and risks ignoring other kinds of subjectivity/defining 'male' subjecthood as something necessarily separate. But there may be something in the idea of the body's place in the ontology of cyberspace, what role it plays in our conceptions of home and away and getting lost.

...or why not a whole paper?

2009-10-08T13:58:00.000-07:00

...like, say, "The Collapse of Reality: Textual deappropriation and social realism," which I just generated using The Postmodernism Generator (reload the page to generate more essays).

Representative sample:

“Class is fundamentally meaningless,” says Lyotard. However, the premise of patriarchial narrative states that consensus is a product of the collective unconscious, but only if Baudrillard’s model of the preconceptualist paradigm of reality is valid. Derrida promotes the use of textual deappropriation to analyse and read society.

If one examines patriarchial narrative, one is faced with a choice: either reject social realism or conclude that the goal of the artist is deconstruction.

(A lot of these kinds of projects work using Markov chains and statistical analyses of language. For example, a common approach is to break an block of text into three or four word chunks, then reassemble the chunks by using statistical predictions of which words are most likely to follow other words. This produces strangely readable, sometimes actually meaningful, sentences and passages; the illusion of machine intelligence is generated here in a manner similar to Weizenbaum's famous ELIZA program. I wrote a program using some of these concepts to generate random dreams, using a journal I kept of my own dreams as the seed material. You can look at that project here.)

short cuts to prose

2009-10-08T13:57:00.000-07:00

"The illusion of pop culture invests itself in the politics of linguistic transparency."

Sample one from "The Virtual Academic." Make your own!

Adobe Infinite Images

2009-10-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

Adobe Labs is experimenting with "Semantic Autogeneration of 3D virtual worlds." These worlds are composed entirely of images gathered from image archives like Flickr or Picasa; and unlike something like, say, Photosynth, which composites 3D space by using GPS and other location-based data, Infinite Image's environments don't necessarily need to exist in the real world. Instead, they are composed by linking together the meanings of images -- or, at least, the meanings as captured by the metadata/tags associated with the images. So, for example, you could create a seamless 3d world composed using only images of skyscrapers or hallways...

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Skip to about 3:00 for the fireworks...

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Web Squared

2009-10-08T09:08:00.000-07:00

Tim O'Reilly is a great source for intelligence on emerging technologies and practices. His recent white paper, "Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On" (link here or .pdf here) is an excellent and essential summary of how the new media landscape has changed since the mid-2000s and includes many provocative insights into where things are heading. As critics, we ought to be at least up to this level in terms of our awareness of the state of the art...

NYFF dispatch: self-performance on YouTube

2009-10-07T16:10:00.000-07:00

I'm still piecing my thoughts together from the Views program at the New York Film Festival, but I thought I'd share a bit about one film that showed there, Amie Siegel's My Way 1, which is a compilation of YouTube performances of "Gotta Go My Own Way," from High School Musical 2.

While I found the film interesting for the mixture of performance and earnest expression it reveals on the part of the webcam operators, or the gendered, racial, and national dynamics at play in each video, I was actually most struck by the film's placement within a program of fairly highbrow avant-garde film. The still (which is actually not a still, but a composite) that was chosen to represent the film actually misleads the viewer, imitating the rhetoric of the filmstrip while this piece would be more accurately described as a video. Beyond that generic qualifier of video as the non-celluloid, it's something that is also distinctly identifiable as an autobiographical and I would even say a YouTube-specific genre, the domestic karaoke performance.

As a friend pointed out to me, the piece is also not new -- Oliver Laric, for example, previously created a piece called 50 50, which includes 50 performances of various songs by 50 Cent. The cuts are shorter than Siegel's and, with the soundtrack playing over all the clips, Laric's piece is arguably more about continuity across a range of performances, most of which all demonstrate the same imitative style. In this way 50 50 (which seems a play on 20/20 vision) seems to explicitly engage the ways in which music videos contribute to a culture of sameness, and thereby critiques the supposed openness and difference promoted in a space like YouTube.

Siegel's film, on the other hand, takes this question of individuality more seriously, and includes performances that do not include the original soundtrack, versions sung in different languages and in transposed keys. She chooses a wider range of performers in race, class, and to a lesser extent, age and gender.

It's a little strange, then, that My Way 1 (which is part of the My Way series; another film includes, as you would expect, Sinatra's classic) goes the way of the film, at least by the standards of the New York Film Festival. Unlike Laric's piece, it's not even available to view as a YouTube video. Ontologically --and perhaps this is a matter of the critical position it takes up-- it is identified with a cinematic practice, while its subject matter is about Internet self-performance. I wonder to what extent different media are invested with certain critical functions, and what difference is registered when speaking outside, as in Siegel's case, or from within (at least partially so; the piece was exhibited in museums and written up by Artforum as well), as with Laric.

taking positions

2009-10-06T23:02:00.000-07:00

Not comparable with the the Rodney King case and the attention the recording on video got back then, but maybe still as a kind of public yet alternative information-, image- and discourse-circulation: After the killing of 16 y/o Derrion Albert by some gangs in Chicago, a lot of youtube videos popped up with people commenting on, i.e. mostly condemning the incident, but also reflecting on how things could be changed and on the transmission and distribution of information.... a challenge or a confirmation to Juhasz statement about the lack of political activism through youtube? (anticipating Lara's presentation this Friday a little)

most viewed - clip.

inspired by Martin Luther King "How can we change this? Let me know what you think"; many comments.

"I cried"-analysis and police-critique. (woman!)

censorship, anonymity, strangeness

making a music clip out of it

The Executive Function

2009-10-06T18:12:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Magazine recently ran a long piece on the importance of "mature dramatic play" in young children. It centers around the notion of "executive function", which basically means one's ability to self-regulate one's skills. The new methodology called Tools of the Mind (based on the theories of Lev Vygotsky) is all about engaging school children in this "play" as a means to make them increase their executive function. In Tools of the Mind classrooms there are no gold stars, no timeouts and no "telling the class that they are all going to have to wait until Jimmy is quiet". For Vygotsky, a child's ability to play was a better gauge of her future academic success than any other indicator. During play a child must follow the rules of make-believe and encourage others to stick to the edicts of the fiction, developing self-control.

Some of the theory's wording is a little cringe-inducing in its ignoring of psychoanalytical theory's basic concepts. The whole "children must know how to master their thoughts" is a bit creepy in its disregard for the unconscious. If psychoanalysis has taught us anything is that, in fact, we can't "master" our thoughts. We can learn how to deal with them, but we can't bend the thoughts themselves into some kind of "executive functionality". Or can we?

Either way, it does bring about this business of having entertainment, work, play, play-work, pornography and art (along with their endless permutations) housed in the same console. "Executive function" will increasingly play (excuse the pun) a role in productivity because a mere click can make one go from the world of a Google Books version of Ulysses to FreeTrannyVideo.com. How to "manage" the desire to drop "mature play" and give in to "play play"? Which one is which? How to not let the time management battle between Ubu.com and World of Warcraft be an always already rigged one?

EXCERPT of the DAY

2009-10-06T18:00:00.000-07:00

"At a New York City pilot program, School of One, for example, each student has a daily 'playlist' tailored to their instructional level, interests and learning style. The school blends online learning, small group sessions and tutoring. It's a vivid picture of the shift from age cohorts slogging through a textbook to personalized digital learning. Some interesting predictions the article, which is apparently not online, puts forth: "By 2020, most high-school students will do most of their learning online. It shouldn't take that long, but it will."

Tom Vander Ark, education entrepreneur and blogger at EdReformer.com

Toward an Effective Graphical Argument

2009-10-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

I'd like to make a brief comparison between a successful and a missed opportunity for creating an effective visual argument regarding the "news" this week. Rio de Janeiro's Olympics bid video presents its main argument - that the games have never been held in South America - by showing a world map with blue dots popping up at every city that had hosted the Olympics. The visual absence of any dots in such a vast piece of land (all of S. America) suggested a sense of absence and unfairness that even the touching verbal speech of President Lula could never match. It is also worth noting City of God-director Fernando Meirelles - who directed the video - edited out all shantytowns that also dot the Rio landscape, properly sanitizing the city into consideration.

The same day the Olympics video was shown and Rio's victory announced, The New York Times ran a front-page article on the financial costs of being a gay couple over a lifetime. It turns out that after careful statistics and hypotheses (algorithms? mathesis?), the newspaper argued it may cost a same-sex couple almost 500,000 dollars more to simply exist than a heterosexual couple. Although the digits could never convey the emotional or ethical implications of marriage inequality, it may serve as a graphical supplement that could either sway public opinion or claim a kind of queer plight representability. Yet the NY Times presented its data very traditionally utilizing charts. The static, overtly familiar visual representation never matched the greatness of the number (almost half a million dollars). Which brings about the question of a possible blindness - akin to a child who becomes "no-deaf" - to certain forms of representation that the digital may bring,or exacerbate.

Hulu Vs. YouTube, Fight!

2009-10-04T18:56:00.000-07:00

Here is an article from Flow that discusses the repeated attempts by NBC and other major media corporatations to shut down YouTube. I found it interesting how in light of Alex's talk, there seems to be no discussion of YouTube as itself a branch of corporate media conglomerates, instead it's as if Google were our local mom and pop media company. I guess there is no such thing as "non-corporate" space on the internet, and this simply looks like "old" television companies trying to figure out how to compete with "new" Google. About half-way through the article, I realized I hadn't watched Hulu in a while, and since I canceled my cable thinking cable and internet are redundant, proceeded to watch about 3 hours of high-quality (picture, I'm not making any claims to "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia being Quality TV), easily navigable television.

Google Book Empire?

2009-10-04T00:30:00.000-07:00

As I was procrastiresearching I came across this interesting article about a current case regarding the digitization of books.

Yay fan culture!

2009-10-02T16:05:00.001-07:00

American Girl: Just Like You

2009-10-02T14:40:00.001-07:00

The Nakamura text mentions the American Girl franchise, which, according to a reference to “American Girl hair” in the season premiere of Gossip Girl, is still going strong. Like many consumer products aimed at children, the AG website features a number of auxiliary activities/quizzes/games for their target audience, young American girls. All of which are designed, of course, to steer parental pocketbooks back to the shopping cart.

I find the “Just Like You” dolls especially creepy. The other dolls (each doll has a “story”) smooth out American history so that its apparent class and racial divisions have been unified in sisterhood. But building “Just Like You” dolls, as Nakamura states, sidestep racial qualifiers in problematic ways. Here is the girl with “textured” hair:

Interestingly, the “mass customization” (in Sarah Berry’s terms) here follows the emphasis on the face that Gonzalez and the DailyMakeover site promote; each “Just Like You” doll comes with the exact same clothes: the “star hoodie outfit” complete with “a hoodie dress, cropped leggings, underwear, ballet-flat shoes, and a plaid headband.” Though such an outfit might seem fairly neutral in terms of race or ethnicity, it does appear to mark a distinct class orientation which is made evident elsewhere on the site as a middle-to-upper class “casual” aesthetic in keeping with the fairly hefty price tag on these dolls. The ability to also outfit oneself like the dolls is also a key sales strategy in the maintenance of wardrobe-as-class signification.

ah! my (failed) makeover

2009-10-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

faces

2009-10-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

I’m interested in the connection of the face suggested in Michele White and Jennifer Gonzalez’s essays. White argues that the particular interface of the computer screen offers a different ontological mode of encounter that collapses the voyeuristic distance of the cinema, and, bringing the computer user in closer proximity to the webcam operator, this complicates the distinction between the “viewing ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ of contemplation.” (65) The Internet at least appears to provide a face-to-face encounter, though White’s argument regarding the constructed nature of Internet self-representation (instead of a sense of “liveness” and simultaneity that provides an illusion of unadulterated access, what is given to be seen is actually highly controlled), however, would also seem to reassert a power imbalance in this mirrored relationship. Though she touches on psychoanalytic and even phenomenological descriptors for the ways in which the computer interface fundamentally departs from traditional screen media, I’m not yet fully convinced that this mode (which shifts in scale and proximity, among other things) isn’t also fraught with the same problematics of looking and being looked at, especially since the communication (I’m presuming this isn’t iChat) only travels in one direction.

Gonzalez’s discussion of the face offers an interesting counterpoint to White; as another site of encounter, the face as she describes through Agamben and Levinas’s work (along with visual/digital artists Burson and Mongrel), as a contact point perpetually in flux, in shifting relation to other (racialized) faces around it. She reminds us that as façade, the face both invokes an architecture and an artifice; it is a constructed surface that simultaneously absorbs and imparts social meaning. It hides as much as it reveals, and this gets at something that I think is under-theorized in White’s piece, the way that one representation might be used to cloak another. Webcam operators (like pregnancy avatars in Nakamura) might offer a new social space for previously underrepresented Internet users, and this in turn also reshapes the Internet in terms of what kind of interaction it allows, but I hesitate at the latent eroticism that female webcam operators employ, or the Bratz-like graphic avatars of Nakamura’s Beaner Dreamers. As much as a new space is opened up, another invisible one seems to be foreclosed. The somewhat overdetermined relationship of race and the visual, as Gonzalez describes, offers insights so long as it’s understood to be a mask alongside a visage.

DIY For the Disconnected

2009-10-02T01:06:00.000-07:00

I was in rural Brazil last spring, at a little natural hot springs town in the middle of the country called Caldas Novas. My boyfriend and I were waiting for hours for a bus to take us back to the hotel, listening to our iPods, surrounded by miserable families trying to sell a bag of popcorn or peanut brittle for 25 cents. When I saw two women interacting I paused my iPod and feigned disinterest but tried hard to hear all they were saying. The older woman asked the younger one (who had a baby in her arms) if she had vitiligo. The young woman said yes and that she had tried a treatment in a nearby town but the bus fare was too expensive so she had to stop. Her body was covered in large spots much lighter than her complexion. The young woman's hair blond (as if burned into colorlessness) and her skin was almost black. Not by birth, but from being scorched by the ungodly Brazilian sun and having never applied sunscreen. The vitiligo spots were so prevalent you may not know which were the spots and which was the inherent color of her "base" body.

The older woman said her niece used to have it too, and that she had the perfect solution for the vitiligo to go away. "You have to go to the middle of the woods. Not close to the city, it must be in the actual woods. You bring a piece of fabric with you and find a termite mound. You rub the fabric really hard inside the mound and then rub it onto your skin. You have to rub it really hard, not softly, around all the spots. Then you leave the fabric inside the termite mound. As soon as the termite eat the piece of fabric the spots will be gone."

I stared at the young woman's face certainly expecting her to show gratitude but complete skepticism. Yet she asked the old woman to repeat the recipe again so that she could remember. "I will do it tomorrow. I will leave the baby with the dad and go to the woods."

before/after...

2009-10-01T23:36:00.001-07:00

thanks for the inspiration, jeff!

Gonzalez’s “The Face and the Public” and Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton

2009-10-01T22:39:00.000-07:00

Despite the repeated assertions of William Gibson’s place as the seer of all things digital in SF, I find that the more obscure and certainly less approachable Samuel Delany has proven to be a nearly preternatural predictor of both the technological and ontological problems of the contemporary world. Certainly, his 1984 novel Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand (possibly the best title in SF history) reveals early thought concerning the applicability of a worldwide information network (i.e. the Internet), as well as a method for determining “sexual compatibility” that bears a striking resemblance to E-Harmony. Yet, I find that Delany’s earlier novel, Trouble on Triton (sometimes known simply as Triton) serves a better purpose for this week’s discussion of avatar culture, especially in relation to Gonzalez’s discussion of race and the avatar.

In Delany’s novel, the residents of Triton possess the capability to alter their bodies in any number of ways; they can determine their own race, gender, even sexual preference through a mere trip to a store. In a world such as this, one would imagine that racism, sexism, and homophobia would be meaningless, considering any person you speak with very well could have been born and lived most of their life in any number of different racial or sexual paradigms. Yet, we find in the novel, that just as those Internet users who obscure their identity behind the shield of the Internet reinforce racist norms, the characters of the novel choose their physical appearance based upon predetermined stereotypes. The main character, Bron, for example, changes himself into a woman when his lover scorns him. His action is motivated by a desire to be the sort of woman that he himself would be attracted to, and thus his feminine personality is dominated by his masculine desires.

This literalization of the avatar problem begs a central cultural question, a question that Gonzalez fails to answer: Is it possible to truly put an end to racism and sexism without simultaneously putting an end to identity itself? Gonzalez asserts that “the philosophical imperative for a homogenous universal subject, without racial or cultural specificity, who might therefore properly participate in a neutral public sphere can be seen as a demand for subjects not only to reveal their secrets but also to find ways to live without them; in other words to find ways not to be disturbing” (59-60). Ultimately, if we use the Habermasian definition of public space, the public space ultimately must be a repressive space, disallowing differentiation.

P.S. As far as DIY stuff goes, I've decided I'm going to use my newfound electronic skills to fulfill a life dream: I'm building a theremin. Check out discovercircuits.com, for those of you who want to make all kinds of stupid things like theremins, motion detectors, and burglar alarms that play shrill synthesized versions of Billy Ray Cyrus songs (though I think that might be a bit beyond my expertise).

DIY and female bodies from different angles

2009-10-01T22:08:00.000-07:00

Considering the original characteristics of DIY culture: from amateur home improvement over subculture towards political resistance and community activities, I wonder how we identify Tupperware home parties, that are organized as social gatherings most often by housewives 40 plus. Meeting like-minded women, eating and talking together, exchanging information about everyday life and lifestyle on the one hand; an event driven by corporate-commercial interest to sell particular goods via a sales agent who, in succeeding (selling $250 plus), gains a certain percentage (10% plus) off the regular Tupperware price to, in turn, acquire these products
herself on the other hand: “Spend time with friends and family. Share and exchange smart tips for healthy cooking, organizing your home and saving money.”
One can also host online parties now.

Breaking “into a strange boys-only subculture”: woman! stop shaving, waxing, threading, plucking, laser treatments – here come the new beards for you too.
Combining commercial, artistic, nerdy and feminist ambitions, she can have her beard from $10 dollars upwards (up to $75).

We see a hand drawing female breasts in different shapes, perspectives and postures on youtube, while we listen to the instructor's male voice. Interestingly he addresses the viewer to leave comments about what they want him to draw next.
As it turns out the calm voice has a website too where he provides free video lessons of how to digitally paint a woman (in photoshop). The self-described "artist" charges for in-person-lessons though.

DIY-baby: women and couples who wish to receive sperm donation can gather information about self-insemination and other pregnancy related topics and products. The sperm is free, but one has to subscribe to the website and repay for the membership every 30days of continuing usage.

DIY Sexism

2009-10-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

The Brazilian website Manual do Canalha (The Jerk Manual) teaches men how to objectify women, how to treat them like crap as often as possible as an aphrodisiac and compiles a barrage of sexist jokes. The site features instances of female objectification in the Brazilian media (a full-time job, I'd imagine), of course, not as a watchdog, but as an instigator. It also compiles video of "stupid" things women say on TV and photos of "ugly women".

The picture above accompanied an advice-post that gave men the following suggestion: "Don't be very romantic. See that little heart of hers? It's cute and we still shit on it." The posts seem to spring out of the very Brazilian truism which says that the worse men treat women, the more women want them. Unfortunately, sites like these in Brazil are likely to provoke the "Oh, men being men" reaction more so than outrage. Something they may share with Italians concerning Belusconi's antics.

DIY Anorexia

2009-10-01T21:24:00.000-07:00

Although the Pro Ana Mia website features a disclaimer on its homepage saying this is not a site for those who would like to become anorexic/bulimic, it pretty much teaches you how to appease your eating disorders without completely dying. The webmistress uses the "I" to speak elusively on the reason for being of the site and then offers recipes, tips and even poems:

"My whole body in pain ...
Should probably eat something ...
But I feel to (sic) ashamed ...

Starting to shiver now ...
Beginning to shake ...
God how I love this ...
How my body just aches ..."

There is also a forum with news and a space for interaction among users. Also chilling is the presence of a few different digital weight calculators, scales and a "jokes" section involving calories and the illusion that they won't make one's body expand.

The website seems a little defunct since 2006, as if it had been left alone in cyberspace unfed, waiting to wither and die. But it is just one of several digital spaces reserved for those with eating disorders to both get a sense of community and, perhaps, a chance to normalize their pathology.

Rethinking Rethinking Representation: Lonelygirl15

2009-10-01T21:07:00.000-07:00

Lonelygirl15 exploited the genre of the teenage girl webcam confessional to create an extended transmedia narrative. But before the story became widely known, "Bree's" webcam dispatches (like the one above, which originally didn't have the cheesy little link floating at the bottom) seemed strangely authentic. In the early weeks of the project, the YouTube community was unsure whether or not Bree was real. The comments on the teen's vlog posts became a part of the story, and the two-way, mirrored nature of the webcam format -- including its associations with feminist and minority empowerment -- became a means of deploying the various narrative figures that were needed to set up the larger story (which turned out to be more than a little bit silly).

How does this kind of hoax-turned-soap-opera fit into Michelle White's vision of "...how women webcam operators have renegotiated their societal visibility, controlled their images, and decided to be visible"? (84) Has the creeping cancer of the antiauthentic (hello, Alex Juhasz) ended the brief moment of intimacy and empowerment brought about by the webcam? Or is there another act to follow?

Flyar

2009-10-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

Flyar: Augmented Reality Twitter Visualization App from YDreams on Vimeo.

Flyar turns your computer screen into a kind of mirror, in which you see little birds that aren't actually there. You can even reach up and push the birds around. How do applications like this affect our notions of embodiment and presence?

More info & download: Flyar

Makeover Culture...and Paris...

2009-10-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

D.I.Y. Makeover Culture

I am curious about the development of this makeover culture across the web--- this example is nothing new (more standard). ivillage offers a free virtual makeover, allowing for the viewer/consumer to test out various hairstyle and make-up products. You can upload your own photo; however, the site also offers a selected group of female faces to “play with” in this process. The campaign for this type of makeover falls along the line of being “risk free” (like so many products). http://beauty.ivillage.com/0,,9jlxfdd5,00.html

Similarly, Instyle Magazine offers a Hollywood celebrity makeover. The viewer again (assumed female) is allowed access to a catalogue of celebrity “looks” (of course, only what is the most recent and most in-style). The features are highly similar to a number of makeover games (applying eyeliner, lipstick, blush and choosing an appropriate hair style for the model). The makeover also allows for the viewer/participant to play an active consumer in acquiring this look (“in reality”) with tips from designers and stylists who actually applied this “look” to the represented celebrity image. Whether it is obtaining Deborah Messing’s cheeks, to Drew Barrymore’s lips, the breakdown of this “look” coincides well with the products applied and described. http://www.instyle.com/instyle/makeover/

Or, there is also the very upfront “warp Paris Hilton” online game…which stretches a bit out of the DIY culture, but offers (I don’t know if “interesting” is the right word here) a very obvious mixing of an image of Paris Hilton (you can also do this your own personal photo- YES!). I’ve noticed that a lot of folks on facebook have been playing with this setting in profile pictures…It’s not deep by any means…mildly entertaining.

http://www.bubblebox.com/play/girls/1265.htm

Bubblebox.com offers another DIY inspired home/shopping network themed redecoration of a girl’s room. The user can change anything from the carpeting, to the window/ color/furniture settings (to my delight- I discovered I could even change the color of my pet bunny to green…now only if IKEA offered this feature, then they’d be onto something.). This game is part of a series of “highly rated” girls games, which makes me wonder about the actual demographics (perhaps the people who actually play this game are people like myself that enjoy the features of changing animal coloring rather than the whole “redecorating” aspect). I am not familiar with this site in the slightest, but I think (from the looks of it) it offers some interesting terrain for looking into this notion of the avatar (especially regarding online female girl corporate branding). http://www.bubblebox.com/play/girls/984.htm

selling makeover culture

2009-10-01T18:16:00.001-07:00

Thought this brief article reflected a lot about the whole online makeover culture and its ties with reality TV, as well as selling this image of "health" within the fitness industry...http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/how-would-you-sell-a-virtual-makeover.html

Daily Makeover

2009-10-01T17:54:00.000-07:00

SO much better.

Rag-doll Avatars

2009-10-01T13:44:00.000-07:00

Lisa Nakamura's text on avatars and visual Culture echoed my experience with Unicef's doll-making workshops in classrooms in France. Terri Kapsalis' quote, "The catalog encourages girls to pick dolls that look like them" (p. 141) reminded me of Catherine, pictured above. She chose the hair color of the doll to be blond and had the outfit sewn but still needed sharpies for the facial features. She asked one of the adult volunteers for help to draw the doll's eyes. The woman yanked the doll out of her hands and told the Vietnamese-French girl: "Why don't we give her beautiful almond-shaped eyes like yours???" and proceeded to draw them without letting Catherine explain that she wanted her doll to have big round blue eyes, as she'd told me.

On the other hand, some of the other children had no problem creating dolls -- off of a given "base" (brown, black, white or orange) -- that did not completely resemble their own bodies:

AR and Image Recognition

2009-10-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

I'm interested in the ways that augmented reality can be used to extend storytelling and interaction into the real world. The literary and gameplay potentials presented by this nascent technology seem limitless. That said, we have a fair distance to go before our world starts looking like the one depicted in Denno Coil. One of the biggest stumbling blocks I've encountered is the issue of precise positioning. Without knowing the user's exact location and orientation, an AR system can't properly overlay/position objects. Most of the AR apps we've seen thus far depend use glyphs to accomplish this task; others use carefully pre-positioned wifi routers or Bluetooth nodes to triangulate the user's location. The problem with these solutions is that, while they make for decent demos, they don't really scale. If we're going to tell stories using AR, I suspect that we'll be looking for solutions that break free of the need for pre-set glyphs, routers or other equipment.

This is where image recognition comes in. Projects like Microsoft's Photosynth illustrate the capacity of image databases to define 3D space. More recently, AR researchers have started to use image recognition/mapping metaphors to create fluid "glyph-free" applications. The team at the University of Graz's Christian Doppler Laboratory have just posted some exciting new videos of their work in this field.

These videos hint at the kind of seamlessness of interaction we can expect from AR in the near future. Someday soon we'll be able to look through little windows like the one depicted below:

More: Handheld Augmented Reality at the Christian Doppler Laboratory

Meet the 'Vook'

2009-10-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

Simon & Schuster is releasing four "vooks", hybrids that intersperse video throughout electronic text that can be viewed on the Web, the iPhone or the iPod Touch. Instead of simply translating the traditional book onto digital form, the vook adds features such as videos demonstrating how to perform an exercise or make homemade skincare potions. You know, high brow stuff. But there are also vook novels (or "digi-novels") in the works that will feature video segments of up to 90 seconds which will advance the plot. There are also plans to "enhance" books by music or even perfume.

"It really makes a story more real if you know what the characters look like", according to Amazon reviewer Fred L. Gronvall. Really? Maybe it's just me but I thought the whole point of a novel was to exercise the reader's (user's?) ima-gi-na-tion.

A less cringe-inducing trend is the participatory novel, in which readers' feedback help construct subplots and new characters for following chapters. "The Amanda Project", a recently released young-adult mystery series invites readers to post their comments on a web site, which then informs what paths the characters will take in subsequent volumes.

How to use new media hybridity, though, to help us understand Lacan, Hegel and Derrida? Or, will the Lacans, Hegels and Derridas of the (near) future formulate their concepts in ways that lend themselves more easily to their hybrid digital presentation and dissemination?

DIY Crossdressing

2009-09-30T23:56:00.000-07:00

Being a woman is, of course, a full time job. Especially if the title hasn't been inherently granted. DIY crossdressing resources online range from community-based tips from one crossdresser to another and for-profit, self-help fare such as Cross-dressing-guide.com, which bills itself as the paid alternative to free crossdressing websites that "still make me look like a dude." Cross-dressing-guide links to several products: books on Voice Feminization Technique, How to Look and Feel Great in a Bra (is it really that complicated?) and How to Whiten Your Skin DVDs (which must say something about femininity and whiteness). It promises to teach you how to "hide your ugly bulge", "smell like a real woman", "create your own face" and "how to package yourself." Who could resist? The lecture on how to whiten the skin seemed intriguing enough for me to Google "how to pass for white", to which there were literally no matches at all. Or, rather, no matches found.

You Give Love a Bad Name

2009-09-30T22:42:00.000-07:00

From the Guardian:

Courtney Love plans to take legal action over the representation of her late husband in Guitar Hero 5. Love launched a Twitter tirade, insisting that she never agreed to Kurt Cobain's final appearance in the video game – let alone the functionality that lets him lip-sync to Bon Jovi. "[I] never signed off on the avatar, let alone this fucking feature!" she wrote. "There's been four breaches of a very strict contract."

And the video:

Jon Bon Jovi coming out of Cobain does indeed seem something of a travesty. I wonder how this sort of thing will play out as increasingly photorealistic celebrity avatars become available for anyone with a game console or a laptop to mess around with... The Carl Sagan remixes I posted last week come to mind, as do darker things -- porn featuring dead movie stars (or, perhaps more unsettling, live ones), machinima "remixes" of classic films with new casts, faked cell phone footage ginned-up with AR avatars and voice-matching software... Think of fake Twitter accounts claiming to belong to public figures but really originating from some lonely fan's apartment, then add a 3d visual component, realvirtual presence, credibility...

Arduino

2009-09-30T22:32:00.001-07:00

Anyone interested in going further with DIY electronics projects should check out the Arduino:

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software on running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).

The boards can be built by hand or purchased preassembled; the software can be downloaded for free. The hardware reference designs (CAD files) are available under an open-source license, you are free to adapt them to your needs. (arduino.cc)

Pregnant avatars - a reading response

2009-09-30T21:59:00.000-07:00

Lisa Nakamura's text was very inspiring in that she touches on so many issues in her text and yet they all relate to the notion of visibility: the invisible of public imagery and discourse, the ones assigned to a certain understanding of domestic space/place (i.e. the female body), the matter of representation in relation to value and knowledge production, the legitimacy of academic disciplines (e.g. visual culture) and the definition of what is worthy of research and what not; not least an understanding of the body (though I find it as difficult to tell what 'it is') as entangled within a circuit of different forces (social, politico-historical, individual, technological, virtual etc.) that produce embodiment even (or all the more so) in the form of resistance and play. There is thus the double outcome of reproducing and enforcing social norms and identity images while at the same time using the web space to perform a different embodiment: through the figure of the pregnant avatar as “databodies that women deploy as part of a visual counterdiscourse to the images of the databodies on the Internet that” (134) is mainly the white male (in other words neutral/ized) databody, seen within a mind/body-dualism, that ultimately seeks to escape its bodily shell (159)...

It is through a reappropriation of the visual and visibility (the signature of the avatar) that the female body (before, during, after pregnancy) inscribes itself back (into this virtual space) as a very concrete body; neither rendered hyper- nor invisible (158). This goes hand in hand with the possibility to subvert dominant and exclusive technologies (or shall I call it apparatuses, both terms borrowed from Foucault) like medical treatment: using professional language to induce a counterknowledge and a supportive bonding between the female forum users. This becomes a kind of sharing à la Nancy – the sharing of a common language without becoming an essentialized unity: the avatar is “a hybrid form that remediates the pregnant body in truly multifarious ways [...] complicated, at times visually incoherent“ (159).

Sharing here also comes to note sharing information via interaction, abandoning the idea of possessing a fixed site of identity while yet demarcating the pregnant body, pregnancy, as “an identity state” that has to be included into questions of identity, representation etc. no less than gender, race, class – which are all intertwined rather than (kept) separate(d) categories.

Reading Nakamura I also ask myself how a formation of (academically or socially acknowledged) canon has to be understood in this particular case – not only in relation to gender, class and (kitsch) style, but very much also in terms of 'genre' or affect: Is it, so to speak, easier to write about the practices of mourning and loss than the use of humor by avatars?

EXCERPT of the DAY

2009-09-30T19:51:00.000-07:00

"But it is important to remember that virtual community originates in, and must return to, the physical. No refigured virtual body, no matter how beautiful, will slow the death of a cyberpunk with AIDS."

Allucquere Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995), 113.

"go offline!"

2009-09-30T18:45:00.001-07:00

I'll post more in a bit, but the Michele White, along with Diego's post about the greatest freakout ever kid, reminded me of this video (another videogum gem):

D I Y

2009-09-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

One the questions about the availability of information and the rise of D.I.Y. revolves around security/weaponry. I tried to gather examples of D.I.Y. techniques that might, under some circumstances, be considered worthy of regulation, or at very least suspicion from a state agency hoping to maintain the monopoly on violence. I didn't look up anything I imagined would get me on any sort of FBI/DHS watch list, but one can imagine the possibilities.

Bump Key - This nifty little video instructs one on how to devise a key that will open almost any standard lock, a super fine device should you take up a career in burglary so as to augment your stipend. The chap in the video says that he's spreading the info because the 'bad guys' already know about it, and he's just equalizing things.

DHS Nausea Weapon - It's wonderful, finding new ways of putting down disorder and disobedience without resorting to blood or death. For those who want to set phasers to stun, we have a video about how to make the Department of Homeland Security's very own sickness-inducing light gun. Build one of these suckers and be ready to shoot back!

Homemade Explosives - These aren't exactly the pipe bombs of 'Steal This Book' or 'The Anarchist's Cookbook', but they demonstrate the potential increase in the availability of 'dangerous' knowledge. A link near the bottom of this page tells you how to make your own thermite, what fun!

Zombie Survival - Just to point to the fascination with preparing for fictional eventualities with real-life contingencies. I wonder if discussions of weapon construction seem less or more disturbing when placed under the heading 'preparing for z-day'.

Digital Withdrawal/Teenage Hysteria

2009-09-29T21:17:00.000-07:00

Where is Charcot when we need him?

Teenager freaks out over cancelation of his World of Warcraft account by his mother.

P.S. I love how the economy of the fatherly "shut up!" is enough to silence a fit of mother-provoked hysteria.