I recently presented “Skins 1.0: A Curriculum for Designing Games with First Nations Youth” at FuturePlay 2010, which happens alongside GDC Canada in Vancouver, BC. The presentation was well-received and the paper will be published in ACM Proceedings.
I recently presented “The Good, The Bad, and The Sultry: Indigenous Women in Video Games” at the Unpacking the Indigenous Female Body Symposium put on by Dana Claxton at Simon Fraser University. I figured I would share some of my thoughts since I’m all twisted up dreaming about new media culture jamming these representations.
So before you read this, keep in mind that I’m a gamer and a game writer. I don’t mean to condemn the game industry, nor do I mean to excuse it. The easy thing to do would be to shun the game industry and cast aside the medium, but there is great potential in games to incite change, given their educational and interactive properties. Not to mention they’re fun. Read the rest of this entry »
I think it will be fun to do a slide show of portraits of AbTeC avatars for my presentation for PSi, the Performance Studies gathering I’ve been invited to in Toronto in June. So I’ve been looking through the hundreds of Second Life snapshots that I’ve taken over the last few years. Today I revisited an artwork from 2008, a collaboration between Bea Parsons and myself, called Guided By The Four Directions.
"Guided by the Four Directions", 2008, Bea Parsons and Skawennati
The image, divided into quarters like a medicine wheel, depicts four incarnations of Bea’s Second Life avatar, Bea Box. Bea has spent countless hours exploring this virtual world, many of them devoted to finding skins, hairstyles, clothing and props that would make our avatars look “Native”.
I was searching through some old Word documents today and found this, from 2008, I think. It is still so ironic, just plain funny to me, that a bunch of Indians are buying virtual land with real money! But I am so glad we did, for all the reasons I wrote then:
Reasons
• Space
Our own island in SL would be AbTeC’s on-line headquarters, an in-world place of our own to meet each other and to invite interested individuals to visit. We could easily run workshops, give lectures and present exhibitions from here.
• Time
As my research assistants and I build the sets, props and costumes for TimeTraveller™, we have come to realize the huge amount of time we’ve lost searching for places to set up our sets, only to have to pack them back up again at the end of a meeting or work session. Having our own land, with the necessary building permissions, would allow us the time required to move forward on projects. Additionally, if the sets can stay up, we don’t have to worry so much about being on-line at the same time.
• Sandbox/Sketch place
It occurs to me that Second Life could be a great tool for sketching animation. In other words, even if a project will be realized in Maya, a quick sketch of the movie could be made in SL to show to animators and whoever else to convey the general idea of the storyboard, including camera angles & movement, characterization and locations. Our sim could include a sandbox for building plus a kind of “black-box studio” for shooting animation.
Notes From:
INTERDISCIPLINARY DIALOGUES 2009/2010 – WHAT IS RESEARCH?
Session II
Research, Ethics, Politics
February 12, 2010, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m., LB 646 Library Building, 1400 De Maisonneuve Ouest
Presentations by:
Josh Schwebel: Escaping ‘What’ and ‘Is’: research beyond subject(s)
Ioana Radu: Doing research with aboriginal people: the role of knowledge mobilization, engaged scholarship and sharing authority
Eric Ronis: Every Story Needs a Villain (or Does It?): Framing Social Protest Research in 2010
Devora Neumark: Art and Ethics Within and Outside of the Academy
Discussant: Joel McKim (Concordia, Communication Studies)
Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace’s learning initiative “Future First Nations: Native Storytelling through Virtual World Building” made it into MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition, but we need your help to win. Read the rest of this entry »
Concordia University’s Career and Placement Services hosted a panel discussion, ‘Careers in the Gaming Industry’, on Wednesday, November 11, 2009. Six Concordia Alumni from Computer Science and Software Engineering discussed what it takes to get into the industry and their personal experiences throughout their careers in gaming. There was much valuable insight shared with a room of approximately 2oo Concordia students who are eager to break into the industry (of which approximately 10 were women, no suprise there … I just like to keep track of these details). I will summarize what I took from the panel. Read the rest of this entry »
Steven Loft at the IARC Speaker SeriesSteven Loft at the IARC Speaker Series
The development of an artistic discipline based on electronic technologies is an articulation of creative and cultural space foregoing the territorialized domains of cultural and artistic canons. We get beyond the notion of simple mediation and enter the realm of translation, exploring how media refashions the logic of communication strategies to encompass a broader understanding of contemporary cultural phenomena. As curator Catherine Mattes has noted, “translation can loosely be defined as the act of expressing the sense of one language into another parlance or form of representation. When applied to visual languages, translation can transcend the boundaries of specific movements and discourses and does not bind artists by locating them in (or up against) a particular realm.” I interpret this to define a certain absolute and contiguous relationship to the technology available, and to its ability to transform our perception, existing as shape shifter, neither inherently benign nor malevolent, but always acting and active, changing, transformative, giving effect to and affecting the world. The term “language of intercession,” coined by Victor Masayesva, refers to this idea. In his essay “Indigenous Experimentalism,” Masayesva writes, “the Indigenous aesthetic, like each tribal language, is not a profane practice, a basic human protocol, or merely a polite form of etiquette and transaction, but rather, it is the way in which we are heard and commune with the Ancients.” (From http://sarweb.org/index.php?iarc_lecture_steven_loft-p:2009_2010_iarc_speaker_series)
Listen to the talk at http://sarweb.org/index.php?iarc_lecture_steven_loft-p:2009_2010_iarc_speaker_series
Skawennati won Best New Media at the imagineNative Festival in Toronto last weekend for the TimeTraveller™ website. Congratulations to the whole TimeTraveller™ team and cast of thousands.
At this year’s 1oth annual imagineNATIVE AbTeC-ers Jason E. Lewis and Skawennati Tricia Fragnito will present works in the New Media Show at A Space Gallery (401 Richmond St W, Toronto, ON).
We hope to see you all there!
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