Avatars and Doppelgangers: 21st century identities and anxieties

C. GuertinUOIT | EDUC5199G

04 Aug 15

Suzanne de Castell questions the role that prefab environments and worlds play in our off-world

explorations and the quality of our citizenship defined there.

What do you think of her argument that “the real somehow ‘gives substance’ to the virtual and the the virtual transforms the real, materially and politically,

not just semantically”?

Do games make the player or does the player make the game?

How are agency and autonomy “re-engineered” and reformed through

important digital media like online games, deserves more serious consideration than it’s

been getting in any contemporary DIY activism agenda”? (de Castell 216)

Do you agree with de Castell that cross-world mobility is gendered?

Second Life Avatar

What are some of the problems that arise with the use of pre-fab worlds rather than maker culture aesthetics?

Cirque du Machinima Cuckoo Clock

Watch (3:07): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af0GIPiX5Sk

Anita Sarkeesian’sDamsel in Distress, Parts I & II

Watch to 3:09, Part I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=18&v=X6p5AZp7r_Q

Presentations

• Avatars and/or Virtual Reality in Education– Jeanette Oliveira

• Oculus Rift and Pedagogy – Derek Fullerton

• DIY Citizenship – Amy Beecham

Remix as activism (Nicki Manaj’s Anaconda gets a redo)

http://mic.com/articles/123266/nicki-minaj-s-anaconda-helps-indian-rapper-sofia-ashraf-send-a-message-about-pollution

Presentations

• Re-Imagining Intellectual Property– Kevin Walchuk

• Culture of the Copy– Safi N

• Gaming in the English/ESL Classroom– Rodney Robertson

Downloading Anxieties and Border Crossings

Battlestar Galactica is a remake of an inexplicably popular, hokey 1970s television program

The original BSG was accused of being a Star Wars rip-off, but Star Wars was itself a pastiche of so many previous science

fiction experiences that the case was thrown out.

Humans are hardware-dependent and always at a disadvantage when faced with the networked fluidity of

the software-enabled ‘toasters’

Human Hardware Cylon Software

PROPAGANDA

Technodeterminism runs amuck

Biopolitical Fermentation

Postcolonial tale of an uprising against the dark side, the Empire

Viral Subjectivities and Biopolitical Infestation: the anxiety of infinite, perfect replication

The Enemy Within: Post 9/11 Terrorist Cells

POSTHUMANISM: SHOW PLAYS WITH THE “BINARY OPPOSITION BETWEEN THE ORGANIC AND THE MECHANIC” (MCCUTCHEON 6)

CAPRICA SIX’S DEATH AND REBIRTH

REINCARNATIONDeath as learning experience

SECRET CANADIAN SUBTEXTS: CYLON ENEMY STANDS (INVISIBLY) FOR CANADA

CAPRICA SIX: “I’M DIFFERENT”

“HUMANS DON’T RESPECT LIFE THE WAY WE DO”

THE RESISTANCE: “MILITARY-JOURNALISM” MODELED ON “ACTUAL U.S.

MILITARY AND GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS” (MCCUTCHEON 4).

“CALL IT ‘NATURALISTIC SCIENCE FICTION.’ THERE WOULD BE

NO TIME TRAVEL OR PARALLEL UNIVERSES OR CUTE ROBOT DOGS. THERE WOULD NOT BE ‘PHOTON TORPEDOES’ BUT

INSTEAD NUCLEAR MISSILES, BECAUSE NUKES ARE REAL AND THUS ARE FRIGHTENING”

(QTD MCCUTCHEON 4)

HYBRIDITY

CANADA’S TOP SUPERMODEL

“By modeling the culture of an imagined remainder of all humankind on that of the contemporary U.S., the remake not only lends critical urgency to its allegory but also reproduces the universalising tendancy of U.S. national ideology to imagine itself (as that 80s charity single put it) as ‘the world’” (McCutcheon 5).

Vehicles of the Military-Entertainment Complex: Battlestar Galactica Vs Star Wars Vs Star Trek Vs Babylon 5

Watch 2:42: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXnPG19npW8&feature=related

Lawrence Lessig on “How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q25-S7jzgs&feature=fvwkrel

Kirby Ferguson’s Everything is a Remix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmwwjikTHxw