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- Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012
Metaverse Creativity (new title: Virtual Creativity) - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012
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Reclaiming meaning across platforms: Fragmentation and expansion of the self
More LessWhile the rapidly changing digital and cultural environment provides expanded perspective on human identity, the available choices often undermine subjectivity and singular coherence. The resulting sense of psychological fragmentation and renouncement of personal agency haunts the digital and analogue selves. The inability to recognize oneself in the many representations leads to a disassociation akin to one expressed in the myth of Narcissus. In response, some of the late twentiethcentury thinkers theorized a new kind of expanded identity. In this article, I compare Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-animal’ to the functionality of a World Wide Web user in order to examine the extent of erosion of the singular subject as the main vehicle for the sense of self. Furthermore, I demonstrate how ‘becoming-animal’ echoes Marshall McLuhan’s digital Narcissus and results in an implosion of the self, thus failing to be a workable model. In conclusion, I propose that Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of ‘being singular plural’ offers a possible resolution of the polarity between self as a collectivity expanded through digital media and self as a sovereign entity.
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Mom and me through the looking glass
More LessThis article focuses on the collaborative work of the artists CapCat Ragu and Meilo Minotaur in Metaverse environments. The aim is to describe and analyse their cooperative creative process from the perspective of one of the artists/authors, walking through three artistic works that were made in the Second Life® region of Delicatessen: ‘de Maria, de Mariana, de Madalena …’, ‘Petrified’ and ‘Meta_Body’. These projects reflect two aspects of the artists’ work – on the one hand avatar art, and on the other the creation of virtual environments. The text also reflects on the concept of shared creativity, which the artists propose through their avatar creations.
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A Metaverse Art Rresidency: ‘Garrett Lynch Yoshikaze “Up-in-the-air” Second Life Rresidency’
More LessThis article discusses the artist Garrett Lynch’s residency in Second Life®1 at Yoshikaze ‘Up-in-the-air’, HUMLab, Umeå University in Sweden.2 The artist’s mixed-reality live performance and installation work in the ‘virtual’ world, part of a wider artistic practice on networks, focuses on the identity and role of the artist within an environment mediated by networked technology. The residency enabled the continuation of this practice and facilitated through the site of the residency the development of ideas of space and place as they relate to identity. Eleven works, predominantly performance based, were produced during the residency that explored the breadth of the Virtuality Continuum.3 Each investigated the boundary between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ and how creative practice can be produced at their intersection. Techniques of juxtaposition, framing, layering, folding, combination and mixing were employed throughout. Works involved performance across multiple ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ spaces and used specifically built props and environments in-world, performance software for a number of computing and mobile devices and Web 2.0/Second Life mash-ups. A number of recurring themes emerged in the development of work, including liminality, new frontiers, augmented or mixed presence and vision, which formed thematic strands of research. It is these thematic strands, their development and use that form the structuring of this article.
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Roy Ascott’s La Plissure du Texte: Towards some elements of a user’s manual
By Jan BaetensThis article proposes a rereading of Roy Ascott’s La Plissure du Texte, not as has been remade and updated in La Plissure du Texte 2 (a recent Second Life reinterpretation of this pioneering work of collaborative digital writing), but as a cultural practice and artefact deeply rooted in time, and hence affected and transformed by contextual features, such as the shifting meanings of the work’s major theoretical references, namely, Roland Barthes and his ideas on the pleasure of the text and Surrealism and its use of anti-authoritative games such as the exquisite corpse.
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Building a virtual reality model of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty
Authors: Stephen Schrum and Elliot SheedyIn his manifestos, theatre theorist Antonin Artaud called for a ‘theatre of cruelty’ that would immerse the spectators in the theatrical experience, causing a delirium or trance-like state in the audience. However, even Artaud’s own experiments towards staging his concepts failed to achieve his intended goal. In this article, the authors suggest examining Artaud through a contemporary lens, and attempt to stage what Artaud theorized by utilizing the digital technology of virtual reality (VR). (In fact, Artaud used the term, ‘La realite virtuell’, in his book, The Theatre and Its Double (1958), though he was, in no way, referring to the modern technological realm.) To examine the possibilities of using VR to implement Artaudian ideas, the authors began by creating a model of the Theatre of Cruelty using the online 3D virtual environment, Second Life® (SL). Through a close reading of Artaud’s writings, Schrum and Sheedy built structures called for by Artaud. When the structures had been completed, the authors saw that they had not accounted for the living actor, a necessary ingredient in theatre, and one that Artaud found indispensable. They then set out to devise a theatrical production in SL, incorporating live performers, and following the same procedures (such as casting and scenic and costume design) one uses in creating a real-world theatre performance. The resulting production of Prometheus Bound (1926) used a variety of methods taken from Artaud’s writings, poems and performances (as well as references to scholarship on Artaud’s work). In the end, while they staged a successful virtual theatre production of the ancient Greek tragedy, they determined the current state of digital technology is not yet sufficiently developed to realize fully Artaud’s vision, though the production did lay the foundation for further exploration in this arena.
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Editorial
Authors: Elif Ayiter and Yacov Sharir
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