[-empyre-] PS queer new media artists (avatar faciality)

[Margaret Rhee]

Dear Amanda,

I love this so much. Your poster is fantastic. Im actually obsessed with
faces.

How you seen The Face of Another?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK5Rz6txcDU

Fantastic 1966 Japanese science fiction film about post-war Japan and the
face.

So I'm trying to finish revising my paper on Asian Am drag kings and
arduino from our Queer Studies conference panel, rereading Jack
Halberstam's very inspiring Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, and
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. So on my mind is butchness, drag
kings, and embodiment and couldn't help but think back to your fantastic
presentation at the conference and your illuminations prompted questions
for me on form, gender, and drag in video games and virtual worlds.

In terms of the face and avatars. Im not a gamer and I dont analyze games,
but I love scholarship and pedagogy that deals with gaming. I think they
tend to be very queer. I think your work on the face, and of course Zach's
new work yields itself to really fascinating questions of biometrics,
virtuality, and reality. ie certainly the most real virtual images get,
the less real and comfortable they are for us.

Yet, Im interested in how we are defining 'realistic'? And the real? Such
a term is so fraught and ever changing today, no?

The face is def a 'densely packed site' as you've written below. And I've
always loved Anzaldua's introduction and her theorization of interfaces.
always think about the quilt and the strong material in between fabric is
the interface.

Im interested though in how your positionality shapes your analysis of
hegemony, "reality," and "deformance" in analyzing these avatars? What
does it mean to take from literary theory into a new media analysis? Have
you grappled with interpellation? Im also interested as I've been
theorizing faces within digital media and connotations of evil.

Specially, working through theorizing the face through the digital images
of the shooter Seung Hui Cho of the 2006 Virginia Tech Tragedy.  In an
article published in N + 1 Welsey Yang talks about the face, his own face
and Cho's face, the racial face.  At the posthuman conference Julian
Savulescu's current work also deals with posthumanism, mass shootings, and
ethics, in particular the horrific shooting in Norway. While not centrally
of the face, I can't help but think about has the face transformed within
our contemporary technological moment? What about the racial face?  The
face of evil.

ie the face has always been a central site for racialization. So Im
interested in how might contemporary categorization of avatars relate to
Darwinian charts or eugencis during the turn of the century? What might
technological advancement has to do with it. How about our future face of
America? http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19931118,00.html

This is a crudely articulated question, but during my MA at SF State,
would discuss with Tomas Almaguer's on racism's work as believing your
parents are ugly because of ideology. How much of our ideological notions
of these deformances? subvert notions of normative beauty and ugly? of the
Face and Body? And how does queer theory relate or intervene in this all?
Thanks for this, its really fascinating and look forward to hearing more.

take care,

Margaret







>> I'd love to hear from Amanda on how embodying butchness and creating
>> butchness in gaming informs your scholarly work and how it may trouble
>> and/or expand definitions of play? How might play be a political
>> intervention? and a queer intervention? How about race? Does #TRANSFORM
>> DH
>> play or game?
>>
>>
> Margaret, the questions I have about avatar creation systems are kind of
> the inverse of those Zach is working with in his Fag Face project - where
> he's interested in what it means that a face can be read by a machine, I'm
> interested in what it means for a machine to make a face to be read. So
> the
> avatar customization systems go hand-in-hand with facial animation
> technologies, motion capture techniques, and the limitations of
> communicability in digital faces. The face is such a densely packed site
> of
> information and communication that computers simply can't reproduce them
> in
> a way that is realistic enough for us, and as they get more graphically
> sophisticated, they feel more and more eerie  - what roboticist Masahiro
> Mori called the "uncanny valley."
>
> So my avatar customization experiments, both with the gender-bending I've
> done and the deformations that you may not know about but can see on the
> poster I created for the recent Research Slam (
> http://english236s2012.pbworks.com/w/file/54068342/making%20a%20face%20research%20slam.pdf)
> try to reverse-engineer these systems and root out cultural assumptions
> that lie, for example, in the limitations of slider bars that control
> facial features, or in the underlying skeletons that exist in different
> avatar "types" organized by gender and/or race. How do the artists,
> programmers, and technology in these systems codify assumptions about what
> a particular gendered and racialized face looks like - and what its
> maximum
> and minimum dimensions are?
>
> In terms of a political intervention, I've been running through different
> political theories of the face to think about that - Levinas, Deleuze &
> Guattari, Agamben - and I think I've finally settled on Gloria Anzaldúa's
> introduction to _Making Face, Making Soul/Hacidendo Caras_, in which she
> talks about women of color negotiating the space between their true faces
> and the masks imposed on them by a white racist society. Very tellingly,
> she calls this space between face and mask the interface, after the
> reinforcement placed in garments to add structure to collars and cuffs.
> These avatar interfaces are another such struggle between the self and
> hegemony, where one's ability to customize their own likeness (or whatever
> digital likeness they desire) butts up against a restrictive system. And
> for Anzaldúa (and also Agamben), making a face is a manifestly political
> act.
>
> Best,
> Amanda
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