[-empyre-] week two: Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual

[Charles Baldwin]

The second week of October's -empyre- discussion will start tomorrow, continuing with the topic of Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual. The guests will be Yael Gilks aka Fau Ferdinand and Jon Marshall. Their biographical information is below. We expect the discussion will continue around the topics raised so far, but moving more towards avatars and the virtual - though let's see! I look forward to it.

Sandy Baldwin

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Week 2: Fau Ferdinand (UK) and Jon Marshall (AU)

Yael Gilks aka Fau Ferdinand is a performance and visual artist. She is a member of Second Front - a performance art group using Second Life as a platform. She co-directed Odyssey, a contemporary art and performance simulator in Second Life, with Liz Solo.

Jon Marshall is a failed playwrite, avante-rock musician, and novelist. He is also an anthropologist, interested in the history of science and the occult, and since 1994 studying online interaction and the social usages of computers. His work includes writing an ethnography of the internet mailing list cybermind _Living on Cybermind: Categories, Communication and Control_ (Peter Lang 2007) and editing the Cybermind Gender Project for the online journal _Transforming cultures_ (http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/TfC/issue/view/40). More recently he has vered into editing a book on the disruptive psychology of climate change, _Depth Psychology, Disorder and Climate Change_ (JungDownunder Books 2009) and is currently co-authoring a book called _Disorder and the Disinformation Society: The Social Dynamics of Networks and Software_ (forthcoming Routledge).