Sat morning 8:30-10:00
Raced 3D Digital Identities: Critical Interrogations of Race, Embodiment, and Identity
Cassandra Jones, Samara Anarbaeva, Anca Birzescu, Radhika Gajjala, Franklin Yartey
Bowling Green State University
ethnographers of Second Life from a class
the moderator seems to be tweeting this panel like mad. @cyberdivalive
and actually, this makes twitter a horrible choice for a backchannel
Journey from First Life to Second
Samara Anarbaeva
How do ppl’s offline IDs affect SL IDs?
“SL lets one make their true self.”
creation of ID is an ongoing process
interview data
racial passing, gender passing, desire to authenticate race
(I wonder how intimidating it is to have Pathfinder in the audience…)
lots of citing of Nakamura and Boellstorff. http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Age-Second-Life-Anthropologist/dp/0691135282 nice.
appearances seem equally important in SL as in offscreen life
So…
Racing the Vampire: Exploring race and identity in second life
Frankey Yartey
“So, I almost became a vampire.”
the boundaries between onscreen and offscreen life are blurry
autoethnography
“As you can see now, I’m scrawny… but my avatar was muscular.”
Nakamura. Wright: double-consciousness for the african-american diaspora conflation of IDs since an ID was imposed on them
I think this was Frankey’s first presentation… stilted presentation though interesting look at vampire life in SL.
Amateur Machinima
Cassandra Jones
started killing Sims… being a deathdealer
started killing out of boredom. but then started making short films… machinima
machinima-ists used powerful cheat codes.. was a doorway into the technical constraints of game… becoming more hardcore (to borrow from Konrad from my session on Friday)
cheat codes
Audre Lorde and Nakamura
When reigns are wrested away from master, do we create something new or do we just create what existed before?
Teapot Tempest Productions short film Utopia
basically, a school’s students are replaced with blonde, white clones
it reminds me of commie critiques in shows like the Outer Limits but exposes those as hypocritically not applicable to non-dominant groups in the US.
the American rhetoric of individualism is a lie for people of color.
in the end, the resistant recreates dominance