On Saturday I will be conducting a mixed reality performance, 'A Place of Play' between the new HUMlab X at the just opened arts campus at Umeå University and in Second Life (image above). It will be at 11.30 - 11.50 and 13.30 - 13.50 and anyone is welcome to attend. To log in to Second Life download the program and teleport to the coordinates from this link http://t.co/B6g0g6gI. My short abstract from the program for the Arts Campus Open Day is:

James Barrett is a researcher and teacher in HUMlab working with digital narrative and the spatial. James’s presentation at the opening of HUMlab X will focus on the dimensions of digital space. As an avatar Jim will perform in the virtual world of Second Life while performing in the space of HUMlab X at the same time. The performance will consist of live music and a screen running Second Life.

I hope to see you in HUMlab X or in Second Life on Saturday.

Undertakers wear suits and are those who deal with death. Those who deal with life; Zuckerber, Gates, Jobs and the others of the life industry, the digital, do not wear suits.

Zuckerberg's fortune is built on an advertising industry desperate to connect to the 'always-on' generations, people who are no longer eyeballs on TV or cinema screens (from the good ol' days when media was housed in configured build environments that occupied solid real estate). He is an insanely rich stooge who can code, who relies on the mythology of hacking and the dude culture of 'brogrammers' to push yet another configuration of 'being connected' upon the most politically and socially isolated generation for a century. Zuckerberg is the Elvis of the digital, the apolitical pseudo hacker who was plucked from the ranks with one brilliant idea (which it seems was not his but thanks to intellectual property right, whereby you cannot own an idea but only a thing, and his code was Facemash. This concept is mutated over and over again for his captured fans by his content paymasters. He is the symbol for a technical expertise that serves the interests of the powerful who brought him everything he has, and who want to see the continuation of a consumption driven culture at all costs.

We are looking forward to Assassin's Creed III with much anticipation. Judging by this alpha game visuals the graphics and physics promise an advanced experience. The story is also very strong. It comes out in October 2012.

I will be playing tomorrow with DJ Vänlig (Acid Folk) at 16:20 in Döbeln Park in Umeå as part of a demonstration and festival for the continuation of freedom of expression and association via digital media. We will gather at the 'Apberget' (Monkey Mountain) in the town square in Umeå. We will then proceed in an orderly fashion to Döbeln Park for some tunes and talk. I will be giving a short talk at 17:20 on the legislation of information and creativity. Hope to see you there.

Abstract

This presentation demonstrates that cooperation over borders is possible between individuals and groups dispersed over space using online three-dimensional virtual worlds. This cooperation occurs in the production of art, research, teaching and learning, and performance as well as in building social, professional and personal contexts. The borders that are crossed are geopolitical, linguistic, generational, spatial and embodied. Throughout the various ruptures offered by virtual world technology, a sense and understanding of place is required for cooperation in order to maintain coherence for the interlocutors and to be able to meet, talk, build, write, perform and exchange. In this talk, I will use examples of machinima - videos made using screen-capture software on computers, to film places and avatar actors in virtual worlds - to demonstrate how these environments can offer places for cooperation.

Tomorrow seminar at Stockholms universitetsbibliotek (kl 12.00-17.00), Växthuset for Initiativ för ett Kulturens Europa "En digital kultur i rörelse" Twitter: #DigiCultEU I am on at 13:15 (program).

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him (Genesis 2:19, 20)

A QR (Quick Response) code is two-dimensional visual structure that can be registered with a digital camera in a portable device. Whereas a linear bar code may accommodate 128 characters; a 2D QR Code, can comprise as many as 7,089 characters. QR code reader apps are available for the iPhone, the Android, and through service providers such as Sprint. QR codes can be scanned from even low-resolution computer screens, online videos (including YouTube), stickers and printed-paper. QR codes have been used to link to stored content not available on the Internet as well as lead the user to a specific website, special offer or otherwise unavailable multimedia content. Louis Vuitton has used QR codes in product design, and Teradadesign and Qosmo's N Building in Dubai allows users to read the building by accessing GIS-positioned Twitter entries from customers, make reservations and download coupons.


Qosmo's N Building in Dubai
The recent production by Cirque du Soleil of ‘Love’, a tribute to the music of The Beatles, features an iTunes app that is accompanied by a QR code for the 5th anniversary of the production. The user could unlock extra content within the app that includes music, video and still images of the show. The QR code also allows the user to enter a competition to win DVDs and music. Overall, the use of QR codes in publication and publicity has assisted in the expansion of multimedia and cross-platform content. The logical extension of the use of QR codes is as an added dimension to print publications, particularly in relation to subjects dealing with digital and multimedia production.

In any use of QR codes there are three rules to observe:

1) Mobilize the landing page: the site the QR decodes to should be active and even live, with regular updates and a community aspect to it. If the QR Code you have made resolves to a url make sure the page is optimized for display on a mobile device. An easy way round this issue it to make sure the landing page is equipped with agent switching. If the site is not under your control then you can use Google’s mobilizer by adding the url to this string: http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u= If you are mobilizing your own site such as your blog then there is an even better option which will mobilize your site, generate a QR Code for the mobilized url and keep usage statistics, it’s called Delivr. Another possibility to consider is Mippin, which has an option to include advertising but you must have an RSS feed for it to work. Whatever you end up doing make sure the user of your QR Code sees content optimized for mobile devices because 99.9% of the time they will be using a camera phone.

2) The second rule of QR Codes is to make sure the url is as short as possible. Many mobile devices and reader software have difficulty with a QR Code matrix greater than 33×33 and some even falter with those dimensions. This means you should aim for a small matrix rather than a large matrix. In QR Code encoding the number of bytes at a given Error Correction Level (ECL) will determine the matrix size (see chart below) therefore a shorter url can mean a dimensionally smaller matrix. Dependence upon a third-party to decode and direct traffic is dangerous. The content, decoding and url/server provision should be handled by the publisher under contract or within the domain of the publication itself.

3) The third rule of QR Codes is, if the QR Code you have made resolves to a url, the online content must add tangible and significant value to any offline content. In terms of promotion added tangible and significant value includes prizes, limited access materials (special remixes or editions of recordings, limited edition T-shirts and so on) or discounts or coupons.

The method of delivery in relation to QR codes must be carefully considered. Malicious QR codes combined with a permissive reader can put a computer's contents and user's privacy at risk. Dependence upon a third-party to decode and direct traffic is dangerous. The content, decoding and url/server provision should be handled by the publisher under contract or within the domain of the publication itself. They are easily created and may be affixed over legitimate QR codes. On a smartphone, the reader's many permissions may allow use of the camera, full Internet access, read/write contact data, GPS, browser history, read/write local storage, and global system changes. Risks include linking to dangerous websites with browser exploits, enabling the microphone/camera/GPS and then streaming those feeds to a remote server, analysis of sensitive data (passwords, files, contacts, transactions), and sending email/SMS/IM messages or DDOS packets as part of a botnet, corrupting privacy settings, stealing identity, and even containing malicious logic themselves such as JavaScript, or a virus. These actions may occur in the background while the user only sees the reader opening a seemingly harmless webpage. Intricate, artist-created QR codes that are part of larger posters, or online in spcific websites are ways of lessening the risks for hacking with QR codes.

For someone who likes to talk about the virtues of disconnecting, the media critic Douglas Rushkoff seems surprisingly always on. When I visited him at his storefront office near his home in Hastings on Hudson, New York, he was preparing to teach a new class, getting ready for a BBC interview, writing an essay, staring down a pile of articles to read, trying to figure out his new iPhone, and hurrying to finish his third book in three years – a graphic novel called ADD, which revolves around gaming culture, celebrity and the pharmaceutical industry. “It also asks the question,” he says, “what if attention deficit disorder weren’t a bug, but a feature?”

The hyper-speed hyperlinked life is familiar ground for Rushkoff, whose first book Cyberia, made him a popular tour guide to the Internet in the early 1990s, and an early prognosticator of its radical potential. But much has changed between the awkward days of “the ’Net” – then a non-commercial collection of public networks, accessed by local ISPs – and the overloaded era of Facebook, YouTube and iPhones. If Rushkoff is well versed in the language underneath the “digital revolution,” he’s also become one of its most outspoken critics.

“A society that looked at the Internet as a path toward highly articulated connections and new methods of creating meaning is instead finding itself disconnected, denied deep thinking, and drained of enduring values,” Rushkoff writes in 2010’s Program or Be Programmed. His remedy is simple, if ambitious: once people begin to understand how software works, “they start to recognize the programs at play everywhere else – from the economy and education to politics and government…All systems have embedded purposes. The less we recognize them, the more we mistake them for given circumstances."

Understanding how things work In order to make them work better is the basic hacker ethos, but Rushkoff has applied it to his broader discussion of the way the culture and politics of the many are driven by the interests of the few. Between his landmark Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool to his recent book Life Inc., Rushkoff has indexed the risks that capitalism and corporate influence pose to democratic society. Or, to extend the metaphor, he’s sought to show how we the users routinely get screwed by an “operating system” that’s over 500 years old.

“We’re leveraged in so many ways, it’s like, our economy is leveraged to produce more than it can in order for it to survive,” he says. “It’s leveraged to grow. Human beings are financially leveraged now. So how do you roll that back and say, well, you know, ‘this is it’?” Or, rather, “How do you get the good of a zombie apocalypse without the zombies? That’s sort of what I’m trying to help people with.”

Enter Occupy. Rushkoff has watched the movement with cautious optimism, penning editorials on CNN and organizing November’s Contact Con, a powwow of net roots activists and open source hackers working to foster new civic-minded apps and hardware. To include prizes, Rushkoff enlisted the help of Pepsi, which ultimately granted $10,000 to the Free Network Foundation, which was profiled in our recent documentary.

Rather than shun corporate sponsors, Rushkoff revels in what they bring to the table, and in the contradictions of the movement. Occupy’s power, ultimately, is its meme — the idea that a citizenry can not only protest the system but demonstrate a new way of responding to it and reworking it. Like his call to program, Occupy’s nebulous mission may be hard to swallow or carry out. But that also lends it its own kind of power, he says. Its radical promise isn’t unlike the earlier Internet’s: a distributed and open system that could change civic discourse and remake culture.

But as on the strange battlefield of the Internet, Occupy could also crash against its own giant ambitions, which will be heavily tested in the next few months, starting with next week’s “general strike”. Progress will have to be made gradually, says Rushkoff. “There are ways to slowly move towards a sustainable life path, and it’s just a matter of doing that, and I’m hoping that more people in Occupy start seeing it that way – in that more subtle way, rather than exclusively in the kind of activist, let’s-get-pepper-sprayed by cops way.”

Much has changed in the decades since Rushkoff started critiquing the system. But his philosophy is still animated by a big question, one that applies not only to the digital spaces of the Internet, built by the Facebooks and the Googles, but to other kinds of “public” spaces too, in town squares, Congress, and culture: who programmed these spaces, and to what ends, and how can they be hacked into something better?

The above images are taken from the live Web stream of the performance by Imogen Heap for Earth Day. I was impressed I must admit. The reactive gloves were the interface for Imogen's musical software. The 25 cyclists in the video (shot in the Roundhouse in London) powered the event. Nice job.

For a presentation tomorrow in HUMlab to a delegation from the Karolinska Institute Library.

Authorship of a so-called born-digital text demands skills and forms of expression that are radically different from works that are digitized or that employ remediated authoring methods.

The born-digital work "refers to materials that originate in a digital form. This is in contrast to digital reformatting, through which analog materials become digital. It is most often used in relation to digital libraries and the issues that go along with said organizations, such as digital preservation and intellectual property. However, as technologies have advanced and spread, the concept of being born-digital has also been discussed in relation to personal consumer-based sectors, with the rise of e-books and evolving digital music. Other terms that might be encountered as synonymous include “natively digital,” “digital-first,” and “digital-exclusive'" (Wikipedia).


Authoring the born-digital text demands a skill set the includes those needed for the analogue texts that feed into the digital via remediation:

"According to their book Remediation: Understanding New Media by J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, remediation is a defining characteristic of new digital media because digital media is constantly remediating its predecessors (television, radio, print journalism and other forms of old media). Remediation can be complete or visible. A film based on a book is remediating the printed story. The film may not provide any reference to the original medium or acknowledgement that it is an adaptation. By attempting to absorb the old medium entirely, the new medium presents itself without any connection to its original source. On the other hand, a medium such as a movie clip can torn out of context and inserted into a new medium such as music. Bolter and Grusin describe this as visible remediation because, "The work becomes a mosaic in which we are simultaneously aware of the individual pieces' and their new, inappropriate setting."(New New Media Wiki)

It is important to comprehend remediation as including practices associated with older media, which change as a result of the fusion with newer media. Examples of this dual-directional influence include film spectatorship, which has been dramatically altered in the last ten years as a result of the pervasiveness of moving images manufactured for, and distributed by the Internet. In the same way newspapers have changed their production and distribution techniques in response to an information economy radically altered by digital media. Consumption of newspapers has changed as a result of this multi-layered series of influence on how people take in news.

So how should one think about authorship in relation to born-digital texts? Of course it is simpler to break it down into the reading practices that can be associated with the media. The visual includes moving and still images, along with 3D navigable spaces and all the dynamics that can be coded into written text using digital media. One has to only consider the speed and movement of Young.Hae Chang Heavy Industries to see how words become images in a born-digital work:



The visual in a Young.Hae Chang Heavy Industries work is the written word, but it is more than that. With rhythm, dimensions and addressive syntax what can be termed a poem in the analogue sense becomes an experience for the reader. The role of audio in this experience cannot be understated.

Sound is an important consideration in any born-digital work. Sound creates space, contextualizes objects, provides rhythm for the text and guides the reader along a set path of interpretation. Ignoring sound in the authoring process is to present a digital work without its legs.

The creation of space is achieved with the visual and the audile, but relies on the interrelated quality of perspective. Perspective is a vast field of knowledge. Sufficient to say the era of the marriage between realism and quattrocento perspective in the Western Hemisphere is coming to an end.

ur perception of space is dominated by perspective, in the sense of a reduction of the projected size of objects with distance. One of the key jobs of the visual brain is to decode this size diminution as distance in the third dimension, or egocentric distance. If the eye were a pinhole cameras, the projection of the world onto the back plane would be in perfect linear perspective (and in perfect focus). The succession of images projected on the curved retina within the eye what Leonardo da Vinci termed natural perspective, a series of distorted projections that needs to be integrated over time in a representation in the brain as the eye moves around the scene. How the brain decodes the information in natural perspective into an accurate appreciation of the spatial layout has yet to be resolved. (Principles of Perspective)

In many examples of online visual 3D media (e.g. Second Life, World of Warcraft) depth of focus is infinite and there is no central vanishing point. Natural perspective is gradually being coded by digital media in the current age. This is an exciting prospect. My advice is look to the artists and not the geometers.

A coded favor is offered by the earth
Two torn sticks wound with bark and the mud of the river
This secret was first shared with a few
To borrow from life something of magic or beauty made it valuable
It was kept then in the temple and later in the palace
For a very long time the soldiers guarded it without knowing what they were doing
It was never shared but the forces of its creation were understood by others outside the palace
Unable to make copies the holders of knowledge took power
The palace was opened and the secret spilled upon the ground
The next day the streets were cleared.

The American Novel Since 1945 (ENGL 291)

Yale Professor Amy Hungerford's lecture on Kerouac's On the Road begins by contrasting the Beats' ambition for language's direct relation to lived experience with a Modernist sense of difficulty and mediation. She goes on to discuss the ways that desire structures the novel, though not in the ways that we might immediately expect. The very blatant pursuit of sex with women in the novel, for example, obscures the more significant desire for connection among men, particularly the narrator Sal's love for Dean Moriarty. The apparent desire for the freedom of the open road, too, Hungerford argues, exists in a necessary conjunction with the idealized comforts of a certain middle-class American domesticity, signaled by the repeated appearance of pie.

00:00 - Chapter 1. The Beats: Similarities and Differences to Literary Modernism
09:46 - Chapter 2. A New Use of Language: Mirroring the Speed of Experience
18:13 - Chapter 3. "The Prophet of 'Wow'": The Language of Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady
29:48 - Chapter 4. Dean and Sal: Tangled Sexual Tensions
33:56 - Chapter 5. The Hunger Metaphor: The American Culture of Consumption
40:21 - Chapter 6. Modes of Craftedness: Carlo Marx's Papier-Mache Mountains

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Spring 2008.

In this second lecture on On The Road, Yale Professor Amy Hungerford addresses some of the obstacles and failures to the novel's high ambitions for achieving American community through an immediacy of communication. Sal Paradise's desire to cross racial boundaries, for example, seems ultimately more exploitative than expansive; Dean's exuberant language of "Yes!" and "Wow!" devolves into meaningless gibberish. And yet the novel's mystical vision of something called "America" persists, a cultural icon that continues to engage the interest of readers, scholars, and artists. Among these latter is the digital art collaborative Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, with whose online work DAKOTA Hungerford concludes the class.

00:00 - Chapter 1. Kerouac's Mythical America: Trans-historical Communities
22:03 - Chapter 2. Defining American Identity: Sal's Illusory Vision of Mystical Oneness
30:01 - Chapter 3. Dean and Sal, Again: The Theme of Sadness
41:12 - Chapter 4. The Publication History: Creating a Literary Object

With a 3D printer and laptop, does everyone have the tools they need to build a bio-weapon? Science fiction novelist, blogger and activist Cory Doctorow talks to Nigel Warburton about whether we can - or should - attempt to regulate subversive technology.

Uffe Elbæk (born 15 June 1954) is a politician of the Danish Social Liberal Party.

Elbæk is the founder and former Principal of the KaosPilots International School of New Business Design and Social Innovation, located in Aarhus. The KaosPilots school inspired the creation of several international schools, located in Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands.

From 2007 to 2009, Elbæk served as the CEO for the 2009 World Outgames.

In July 2010, Elbæk founded the consulting company Change The Game with the focus on leadership training, political campaigning and social innovation concepts. Elbæk served as special advisor for the leadership team at the KaosPilots and as an academic adviser for the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity in Hong Kong.

Elbæk won a seat in the Folketing for the Danish Social Liberal Party in the 2011 Danish parliamentary election. On 3 October 2011 he was appointed Culture Minister of Denmark in Cabinet of Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

 

On Thursday February 23 at 8 pm, Knutte Wester's documentary "Gzim Rewind" will be shown on Swedish public TV, channel 2. I was involved in the pre-production of this film as a consultant for sequences that were to involved machinima film, but became the sketched war scenes.

See a clip from the film and an interview with the artist

Gzim Rewind on SVT:
SVT2 23 feb 2012, 20.00
SVT2 24 feb 2012, 15.50
SVT2 25 feb 2012, 13.15
SVT2 26 feb 2012, 00.05

Additionally, the film will be shown at Moderna museet as part of the documentary film festival Tempo's Balkan program "The Screen of Memory", on March 8 at 3:15 pm. The film had its Swedish premiere at the Gothenburg International Film Festival this year, where it was nominated in the category Best Swedish Documentary.

More about The Screen of Memory

Don't miss Knutte Wester's ongoing exibition at Västerås Museum of Art, until 8 April. The exhibition presents three recent projects.

More about the exhibition

More about Knutte Wester on www.gsa.se

In a dialectic process describing the interaction and resolution between multiple paradigms or ideologies, one putative solution establishes primacy over the others. The goal of a dialectic process is to merge point and counterpoint (thesis and antithesis) into a compromise or other state of agreement via conflict and tension (synthesis). "Synthesis that evolves from the opposition between thesis and antithesis." (Eisenstein, "The Dramaturgy of Film Form" 23). Examples of dialectic process can be found in Plato's Republic.

In a dialogic process, various approaches coexist and are comparatively existential and relativistic in their interaction. Here, each ideology can hold more salience in particular circumstances. Changes can be made within these ideologies if a strategy does not have the desired effect. An example of the dialogic process can be found in Nozick's, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

These two distinctions are observed in studies of personal identity, national identity and group identity.

G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) introduced the concept of dialectic process to explain the progression of ideas.

M. M. Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher and Literary Critic has been credited with introducing the Dialogical process in Philosophy.

This is the first in a series of thirteen lectures with Professor David Harvey,  a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for over 40 years. Read his CV. All of the lectures are online. I am wading though them at the moment. While they are dense, they are very very worthwhile.

Professor Harvey makes an extensive and profound close reading of Capital, enclosing the text is a detailed account of references, arguments, logic and methods  according to a historical analysis. Professor Harvey's reading displays a heavy reliance on New Criticism, which contains little evidence of contemporary examples and adaptations to the post-industrial world of global capitalism and information as a commodity.

The page numbers Professor Harvey refers to are valid for both the Penguin Classics and Vintage Books editions of Capital.

Marx as presented by Mark Steele. A nice context to the Labour Theory of Value. Marx seems like a dreamer, a poet who dealt with the hard realities of State power and the ubiquity of capital.

We welcome Pyewacket Kazyanenko as the new artist in residence within the Yoshikaze artists' studio in Second Life, run by Goodwind Seiling aka Sachiko Hayashi and provided by HUMlab.

Pyewacket Kazyanenko states in an Outline and Intent for Yoshikaze Residency:

I've spent the last few years working with Stelarc in simple virtual displays and performance. In my virtual work, amongst achievements and satisfying victories , things inevitability go wrong, strange things happen, sculpts appear wrong, scripts and codes don’t work correctly, robots break. Not being much of a coder or a mathematician, my approach to working with code and 3D environments has always had a naive and random quality.

In my exploration with the Yoshikaze residency I hope to further my relationship with the 'glitch' in virtual worlds. The genera of digital glitch art has become quite popular but little has been explored in virtual worlds. I will enter the space with an empty pallet, clear mind and simply explore, try and make happen the wrong, the glitch and the obscure, mixed with ongoing adventures and inspirations that happen daily inworld.

My research into avatar psychology and the notion of 'artistic role play' will also have some effect on what I will be doing. This brings the digital unconscious into the work with dreams, desires, needs, failures, a sense of humour and a longing for creativity.

We look forward to the coming months. If you would like to keep up to date with what Pye is doing, the Yoshikaze blog is being updated regularly and you can visit Pye in world from 15 February until the 15 May from the slurl to Yoshikaze: http://slurl.com/secondlife/HUMlab/95/215/351

-----------------------------------

For Syria

I cannot recommend highly enough DJ Mutamassik. This is track #1 from Mutamassik's 2010 LP, "That Which Death Cannot Destroy" The full album is here. This album cannot be bought or sold. All instruments (Cello, Drums, Mazhar, Keyboard, Turntables) & tracks performed, produced & engineered by Mutamassik at G.G.S.S./Rocca AlMileda Studio. 2010 Special guest vox & asst. engineer: Meroe Amade' Memphis Video: G. LOLI

MUTAMASSIK(meaning Stronghold, Tenacity in arabic) is a producer, dj, artist, pioneer of SA'AIDI HARDCORE & BALADI BREAKBEATS. RELENTLESS RHYTHMS FROM THE PAN-AFRABIC IMMIGRANT SOUND SOURCES. AFROASIATIC MOKKASSAR in addition to transcendental sonic experiments. Darq Matter Qubti Funq Punq Demm Baroque Melanqol Met'al Martial SA'AIDI ARABIFIED SWAMP MUSIC FROM THE RUSTBELT+++ Has performed extensively throughout U.S., Africa, Middle East & Europe. Press includes: The Village Voice, The Wire, Le Monde, African Sun Times, New York Times, Bidoun, The Fader, Newsweek (Arabic edition), American Society for Engineering Education, XLR8R, etc. "This is inhuman, brutal, awesome breakcore." Derek Walmsley - The Wire "Mutamassik's pounding Egyptian hip-hop breaks...are serious, sacred, steadfast marching music for the new international breakbeat generation." Ron Nachmann - URB "Dans un melange d', d'electronique et de hip-hop, Mutamassik s'engage dans la reconstruction des . Arabesque, melopees de minarets se croisent dans un magma de sons urbains, structures par d'impressionants alliages rhythmiques." Veronique Mortaigne - Le Monde "Highly regarded post-techno DJ..." - Mtv News " "Before the sounds of the Middle East became de rigueur sampling materials for hip-hop, Mutamassik was exploring ways of fusing various sounds and styles into a compelling, challenging whole, shards a-flying all the while.”

In "The Gracie Kendal Project" Kristine Schomaker investigates our obsession with the notion of the physical ideal, through her own relation to her alternative ego Gracie Kendal, the Second Life avatar.  The interaction between Gracie Kendal and Kristine Schomaker has resulted in virtual dialogues between the two, revealing the conflicts and even dependency of her dual selves, as well as the influences and impacts one has upon the other.

"1000+Avatars" is an off-shoot project from "The Gracie Kendal Project", however, in its own right.  By documenting individual portraits of more than 1000 avatars in Second Life, the project bears a testimony to the avatar constructions of our time and witnesses the unique composition of our desires in the pursuit of that construct.

Gracie Kendal/Kristine Schomaker is a new breed of Second Life artist.  Rather than pursuing the futuristic vision of the technological possibilities of the virtual, her projects firmly place themselves within the social, historical and psychological context in which ""[t]he avatar becomes a vehicle for personal and public reflection."

Yoshikaze is proud to organise a presentation by Kristine Schomaker on 30 January, 2012.  The presentation will be held from 4pm at HUMlab, Umeå University,  via Skype video connection with Kristine Schomaker in her location in Los Angeles.

Yoshikaze curator: Goodwind Seiling/Sachiko Hayashi.  Yoshikaze is part of SL HUMlab activity. 

---------------------------------------

[Description of the Projects by Kristine Schomaker]

In 2006 I began using new media to bring more attention to the obsession our society has with physical appearance. The media is often the hub of this obsession, typified by stars and models with eating disorders, reality TV shows about plastic surgery and advertisements defining the paragon of beauty. This results in an internal conflict between our reality and the idealized.

The Gracie Kendal Project is a close-up daily view of a personal, social and psychological co-existence with my virtual persona. My work deals with the process of becoming self-aware while living in a society obsessed with physical appearance. It is symbolic of the personal anxiety and loss of identity occurring in a world where visually aggressive advertisements dictate who you are supposed to be. In this environment I find it difficult to be comfortable in my own skin.

Every day I would take pictures of both myself and Gracie and place them next to each other comparing the physical with the virtual, the real with the ideal. After observing how we were interacting with each other through photos, I realized there was a dialogue forming. The natural extension in this story was for this dialogue to be realized through actual conversations between Gracie and I.

Through written chat and eventually comic-like banter, we express our inner dialogue in a public way. We have developed a co-dependent relationship in which each of us wishes she were the other. I yearn to have the life she does, the beauty, the success, and independence. She yearns to be free from the constraints of pixels.Using Gracie as a form of self-presentation, I started to explore my relationship with my body as well as question my own identity. I realized that everything going on in my life was manifesting in my body and in the figure of Gracie. Both were becoming a site for anxiety, fear, stress, grief, loneliness and depression. My body and that of my avatar became a source of autobiographical material in which a story was being written.

Comparing the ‘perfect’ Gracie with my real self, I will bring more attention to the obsession our society has with physical appearance. I am hoping to engage with every person who believes they are unattractive, overweight and afraid. I hope young girls will see my project and feel empowered to be brave. I plan to videotape my performances with my avatar and post them on YouTube. I hope to give talks about my project to appropriate organizations and schools, boys and girls clubs and eating disorder groups.

While working on My Life as an Avatar on a personal level, I was compelled to expand my project universally to explore notions of online identity in the construction of other people’s avatars. My 1000+ Avatar project consists of individual portraits of over 1000 avatars within the virtual world of Second Life. This project also questions and explores commonly held assumptions about stereotypes, judgment, self-awareness and those marginalized by race, gender, sexual preference and physical appearance.

The 1000 Avatar portraits zoom in on the complex social and cultural conventions that determine our identity. The avatar becomes a vehicle for personal and public reflection. This series of portraits is a contemporary anthropology of a cross section of avatars from the virtual world of Second Life in the early 21st century. In these portraits, I explore the representation of the avatar as a construct, distinct from any traditional notion of the ‘self’. I examine the sitter’s identity and probe below the avatar surface to reveal and comment upon their character, personality and their diversity.

The subjects are neither simulacra nor characters in a game: they are people, complete, complex identities with defined social roles. The avatar becomes the projection of our identity. Each portrait represents a different personality, a singular life. These people entered the brave new world of virtual environments as explorers, searching for anything and everything, finding a new empowerment- and a new freedom to be themselves. Experimentation is welcome. As an avatar, they are provided with a safe environment which allows everyone to divulge and consider boundaries and barriers that aren’t readily accepted in the physical world.

Key quotations used in a lesson for Language Consultancy Program in HUMlab yesterday. The full notes for the class are here.