Virtual KinoEye

My "Working Theory" piece, an essay with machinima and images, that pulls together much of my sabbatical work on Second Life, is now published in the Journal of e-Media Studies!! See

Virtual KinoEye: Kinetic Camera, Machinima, and Virtual Subjectivity in Second Life

http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/2/xmlpage/4/article/340

Video of the NMC Keynote!!

Here is the video of the Keynote Nettrice and I did at the NMC Symposium--and here you can find the entire program with links to video.  What a fantastic event!  Also check out 2009 Virtual World Best Practice in Education Conference

VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY--NMC KEYNOTE

VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY

Lori Landay/L1Aura Loire

NMC Keynote, March 25 2009

Definitions

Subjectivity is the experience of the “I”.  Subjectivity can be defined, in Raymond Williams’ phrase, as “structures of feeling.”  It encompasses a person’s feelings, thoughts, and perceptions; it emphasizes their individual encodings and decodings of their environment, social interactions, and experiences.  The term comes from the French verb asujettir, which has a double meaning of both to produce subjectivity and also to make subject--it is both creative and restrictive.

If subjectivity is the first-person experience of the “I,” shaped by both individual psychological experiences and wider cultural forces, and it is intersubjective—created socially—then the people behind the avatars certainly bring their actual world subjectivities in here.  However, once inworld, instead of having a body through which to experience the world, we have an avatar and visual and sound input that are not necessarily connected to that avatar’s position.  There are "mirror neurons" in the brain that respond to what the avatar does, but it is different than direct sensory input.  Therefore, the already blurry line between the self and the world is completely smudged in virtual subjectivity.

VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY  

In the rich visual world of Second Life, there is intense visual stimulus. Throughout the rise of visual culture, physical point of view and subjectivity have been connected; to some extent, all visual representation explores this, and as each new visual medium arises, that relationship is recreated and extended.  In a virtual world, the viewer position is both immersive and detached, both connected intimately to our experience of the avatar—but also strangely outside of him, her, or it.  

So, instead of an "I," now we have an "I/Eye" of virtual subjectivity, which is a mode of first-person experience in a virtual world that is founded on a fusion of visual and metaphoric point of view, shaped through "self-design" of the avatar and environment, reinforced and extended through social interaction, and enacted through virtual agency.   Part of virtual subjectivity is the extent to which the mind/body connection translates inworld experiences into embodied sensations that feel "real."  To sum up, there are four major factors that contribute to virtual subjectivity:

1) virtual point of view

2) virtual self-design

3) virtual social relationships 

4) virtual agency

From the conclusion:

I also have a glimpse of something in here—a kind of virtual subjectivity that I would associate with the trickster—a shapeshifter who uses the avatar as a mask, a crosser of boundaries, culture hero or heroine who embodies and enacts central cultural conflicts.  I glimpse a virtual subjectivity that would reveal all of the virtual world as installation space and oneself as a performance artist within it, calling our attention to the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds by finding new ways of crossing them, looping between them, shifting the borders, again and again.

Selected Sources

Battaglia, D., ed. (1995). Rhetorics of Self-Making. University of California Press. 

Blakeslee, S. (2006). "Cells That Read Minds."  New York Times. Retrieved 2009-03-23, from  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10mirr.html

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton University Press.

Cooper, S.  (2002). Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the Service of the Machine? Routledge. 

Curtis , A.  "THE CLAUSTRUM: Sequestration of Cyberspace." (2007). Psychoanalytic Review, 94(1), 99-139.

Landay, L. (2008). "Having But Not Holding: Consumerism & Commodification in Second Life." Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1(2). Retrieved 2009-03-23, from https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/355/265

Ortner, S. (2005). "Subjectivity and

Cultural Critique." Anthropological Theory Vol 5(1): 31–52

Steinberg, M.  (2004). Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-century Music, Princeton University Press.

Vertov, D. (1985). Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. University of California Press.

Walther, J. B. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23(1):3-43.

An Emergent Second Life, Video. [28 min] Paper Tiger TV.  Co- Producer and Director, Bianca Ahmadi; Associate Producer, Juan Rubio; Editor, Juan David Gonzalez; Content Director, Jason Pine.Watch inworld at Brooklyn Is Watching 􀀂 or http://papertigertv.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html

Not Possible in Real Life Blog http://npirl.blogspot.com/

Credits

L1's Eye/I built by Cube Republic (Cube Republic store, Crimson Night (155, 90, 22)

KinoEyePlane built by Alexith Destiny (Destiny Blue Designs, Destiny Blue (173, 15, 1369)

& scripted by Simon Kline  http://www.klinelabs.com/

Interested in learning how to script?  Find out  about Simon's classes! http://www.klinelabs.com/

V-TV

Verbal Television

http://vtvart.webs.com/

Caerleon Art Collective (128, 74, 26)

Misprint  Thursday

with collaborating scripts contributed by Oberon Onmura and Cinco Pizzicato

V-TV examines the beauty in both the visual translation of text and the limitations of text communications in these forms.

Digital text communication like chat, email and texting have increased our ability to share ideas with one another. The concept for V-TV, or Verbal Television, is to translate text communication to a visual form of communication. V-TV responds to text input by creating a digital art display which becomes a sort of visual poetry.  The piece, is, however limited in its scope and function to respond which perhaps mirrors the idea of the limitations of non face to face communication.

SEE THE ENTIRE NMC SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM HERE

First Machinima Footage Posting!

Here is the a very rough cut of the footage I shot yesterday with Maya and Lynsey at the Bicylorama in Woodstock.  The sound is not done, it is not really edited down to a real piece, which will be much shorter, but you can get the idea of what I am up to making machinima.  There is a lot of footage of the bikes and the bicylorama in the middle, but some interesting interview takes with Maya towards the end.  There will be a voice over throughout, maybe with Maya's narration, too, from a voice interview.  Maya and I will also reshoot the interview, and maybe have a voice interview with Lynsey, too, to replace what we shot at our happy accident meeting late at night here/early in the morning there that I put at the end of this cut.

It has been a real learning experience getting this far with this piece.  First time working with others, which is much more fun and rewarding than with my alt avatars, but also adds an element of pressure.  Of course the lovely ladies in the video and who I am now lucky enough to have in my second life are nothing but supportive, encouraging, and well-humored no matter what time of day or night it might be in Holland or England, but I am relieved to actually have something to show them (and others) that gets this project out of my head and glimpsed by someone else.  

I am also desperate to turn off L1Aura's speech gestures, which are no longer active, but persist.  In a year when I have no students and I am not lecturing at all, my avatar is in constant lecture mode as soon as she goes into voice chat, gesturing and opening her eyes, leaning back self-importantly, blathering on and on, interminably.  After a whole day spent filming her, trying to get her to look in the right direction, staring into her face with her flip-flapping mouth, I wish she would shut the f*** up.  How's that for a person-avatar relationship?  What's the Proteus effect there?

So here are some of my thoughts: Virtual subjectivity is even more individualized, more, well, subjective, than in real life, I think, because of how differently each one of can be seeing the same thing physically with the camera feature, how no one knows what any avatar is really doing or looking at.  Add in the lag, and we are not really experiencing the same thing even when we think we are.  I see the difference between my different avatars when they are together, what they see, sometimes what they are wearing, where they are in the space.  We are liberated from so much of the mundane in SL, but we don't really have synchronicity yet.  It is still a "consensual hallucination," as Gibson imagined in Neuromancer so long ago (1984!!!!)   The gap between our own and others' perceptions and experiences is one of the elements of real life that is made literal and visual and played out in Second Life.  OK, enough blathering with only 5 hours sleep  (the really good stuff comes from 4 hours or less).