article
FCJ-054 Digital Bodies and Disembodied Voices: Virtual Idols and the Virtualised Body
Daniel Black Monash University, Australia Introduction The virtual idol, a computer-generated media celebrity, is a figure representative of a cultural milieu in which arrangements of data seem interchangeable with physical materiality. We are currently in an historical moment when form, information and data are widely understood to be rendering matter, physicality and flesh increasingly redundant. Popular and academic accounts of the body as discourse, behaviour as genetically programmed and digital information systems as rendering spatial relationships and physical interaction irrelevant, for example, are all dominant discourses of the ‘information age’. This mode of understanding is perhaps a prerequisite for the appearance of the virtual idol, a figure animated by digital data, an immaterial substance into which seemingly anything – even the body itself – can be translated. The virtual idol seeks to simulate a particular kind of human body: the celebrity who is already heavily mediated and virtualised through her…
FCJ-053 Pervasive Gaming: Formats, Rules and Space
Bo Kampmann Walther University of Southern Denmark Introduction Computer games that move beyond the static screen and into the real, social and tangible world, as well as those that rely on massive networked, virtual spaces are becoming increasingly wide-spread. In Human PacMan the player collects virtual bits of cheese in a real, physical space (see Figure 1). Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix (2005) is a home version of the popular arcade game, in which the players follow dance instructions on the screen with their feet on touch-sensitive tiles. Breakout for Two (Mueller, Agamanolis and Picard, 2002) is a physical interface the size of a large wall that allows two players to play a soccer-like game together, communicating via a body-size videoconference. Both players are kicking a real ball, targeting virtual bricks, similar to the old arcade game Breakout, and aiming to break out to the other side, i.e., to the other…
FCJ-052 Playing at being mobile: Gaming and cute culture in South Korea
Larissa Hjorth RMIT University Globally, South Korea has become a bit of a fetish in the (global) games culture phenomenon. Games are a serious business saturating everyday life and many South Koreans prefer their PCs (with online multiplayer games) to TV (Cho 2005). Seoul is an exemplary model of the ubiquity of gaming culture; highlighting that games and the attendant social spaces and cultural knowledges can be part of everyday lifestyles, rather than a mere leisure activity of a subcultural group. With over 20,000 เว็บพนันออนไลน์ต่างประเทศ game rooms (known as ‘PC bangs’) scattered across Seoul, three TV channels dedicated to gaming, and pro-league players (professionals that can earn over US$2 million annually) treated as celebrity royalty, South Korea’s prolific designing, production and playing of games seems almost a dream come true for anyone remotely interested in gaming culture. Almost. As a place where gaming is an integral part of social spaces…
FCJ-051 Mods, Nay! Tournaments, Yay! – The Appropriation of Contemporary Game Culture by the U.S. Military
David B. Nieborg University of Amsterdam United States (U.S.) Army recruiting did not seem to be a problem after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. However, the ongoing war on terror calls for more soldiers and thus more recruits. Operation Iraqi Freedom in particular has put heavy strains on the available manpower of the Army. A significant part of the U.S. war machine is tied down in the cities of Iraq, requiring a steady flow of fresh manpower and material. The Bush administration has made it clear that it expects the war on terror will be a decade-long battle against a shadowy enemy (Gordon and Trainor, 2006). At the same time, government officials such as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pointed out that the war on terror is also a war on ideas’. According to him, it is a war to spread freedom and liberty, values appropriated by and associated…
FCJ-050 Cameras, Radios, and Butterflies: the Influence and Importance of Fan Networks for Game Studies
Laurie N. Taylor University of Florida Collecting and Interpreting: Walkthroughs, CliffsNotes, & IMDB As a new medium, video games can be analyzed under some of the similar rubrics of other media. However, because of the fundamental differences between video games and older media, including the requirement of skilled user action, alterations to this categorization prove necessary. The study of games has been approached from many aspects, including the study of narrative in games and the study of game play. Both of these aspects complement each other and additional studies, such as studies of video game audiences, further complement game studies as an emerging field. Because video games require skilled user interaction, studying games requires game play. Game play in turn necessitates that players and students studying video games use additional resources to play particular games, and especially to complete particular games or to explore the games as texts to even…
FCJ-049 Negotiating Intra-Asian Games Networks: On Cultural Proximity, East Asian Games Design, and Chinese Farmers
Dean Chan Edith Cowan University The East Asian online games boom started in South Korea in the late 1990s. Following unqualified domestic success, South Korean games were subsequently exported to other regional markets throughout East and South East Asia. During this time, game development companies specialising in online games for the Asian market also emerged in China and Japan. This essay proposes that one of the key features in this networked gaming context is the relationship between the adaptation of regional East Asian aesthetic and narrative forms in game content, and the parallel growth in more regionally-focused marketing and distribution initiatives. East Asian online games design and marketing play to notions of perceived cultural proximity within the region. By encompassing these considerations, this essay aims to offer a contextual analysis of intra-Asian games networks in terms of production processes and related emergent concerns. How have these online games networks evolved?…
FCJ-048 Land of a Couple of Dances: Global and Local Influences on Freestyle Play in Dance Dance Revolution
Gillian “Gus” Andrews – Columbia University As a few scholars of media have begun to note, Actor-Network Theory is uniquely suited to unite the disparate models of the social role of media presented throughout the past century. Where some social constructivist scholars worry that Marshall McLuhans work attributes too much agency to media products themselves, ANT welcomes this idea and suggests we look at how human power is in fact invested in and extended through these products, as Joost Van Loon and Matthew Fuller have detailed in their work (Fuller, 2005; Van Loon, 2005). Where a Chomskyan or Bagdikianian view assumes that media monopolies and other hegemonies retain all power in determining the interpretation of a message, ANT keeps the construction of these hegemonies power in perspective while at the same time considering the repurposing of their messages by fans which is described by audience studies scholars (Hills, 2002; Jenkins,…
FCJ-047 Intimate Transactions: The Evolution of an Ecosophical Networked Practice
Keith Armstrong Australia Council New Media Arts Fellow These artworks invent a gift-exchange community involved in a more intimate sense of transactions that we usually consider impersonal. (Saper, 2001:x) In 2005, The Australian Centre For the Moving Image promoted Intimate Transactions as follows: An immersive, interactive installation unlike any other, members of the public can experience Intimate Transactions for one week at ACMI commencing April 25. The two participants, one at the ACMI Screen Pit in Melbourne, and the other 1700 km away at the Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Precinct in Brisbane, will enter a space at each location that is equipped with a touch sensitive physical interface called a Bodyshelf, embedded with sensors that detect body movement and shifting of body weight. Before getting on to the Bodyshelf, each participant puts on a wearable device that passes gentle vibrations into their stomachs, enabling them to sense vibrations of…
FCJ-046 Entropy And Digital Installation
Susan Ballard School of Art, Otago Polytechnic In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered … There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening … It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless, ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre … Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing. (Calvino, 1997: 5-6) Since, ordinarily, channels have a certain amount of noise, and therefore a finite capacity, exact transmission is impossible. (Shannon, 1948: 48) What would it mean if communication were exact? That, in spite…
FCJ-040 Theses on Distributed Aesthetics. Or, What a Network is Not
Anna Munster & Geert Lovink College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales and University of Amsterdam, Netherlands “Distributed aesthetics: form or forming?” We are moving from living, analysing and imaging contemporary culture as an information society technically underwritten by the computer, to inhabiting and imagining relays of entwined and fragmented techno-social networks. New media are increasingly distributed media and they require a rethink of aesthetics beyond the twinned concepts of form and medium that continue to shape analysis of the social and the aesthetic.[1] They require a distributed aesthetics. Distributed aesthetics must deal simultaneously with the dispersed and the situated, with asynchronous production and multi-user access to artifacts (both material and immaterial) on the one hand, and the highly individuated and dispensed allotment of information/media, on the other. The aesthetics of distributed media, practices and experience cannot be located in the formal principles of their dispersal. This provides…
Future Issues and Archives
Connections
- ARCDigital
- C-Theory
- Cntr History & New Media
- CoDE
- Computational Culture
- Cosmos and History
- Ctrl-Z
- Culture Machine
- Digital Culture and Ed…
- Digital Humanities Alliance
- Digital Studies
- Eludamos
- Film-Philosophy
- First Monday
- Future of the Book
- Hyperrhiz
- Inflexions
- Institute of Net Cultures
- Jrnal Digital Information
- Junctures
- nmediac
- Noema
- Open Humanities Alliance
- Open Humanities Press
- Parrhesia
- Public Library of Science
- Sarai
- Transformations
- Vague Terrain
