#docc 2013

[adventuresintheory]

"'It's a Nigger in Here! Kill the Nigger!': User-Generated Media Campaigns Against Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Digital Games", Lisa Nakamura (2013)

Lisa Nakamura is a professor of Media and Cinema Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Asian American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research has focused on how race is presented and treated in digital media, particularly in video games/gaming culture.

"'It's a Nigger in Here! Kill the Nigger!': User-Generated Media Campaigns Against Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Digital Games" Summary

Games studies, like video games rating systems, has generally analyzed games only by taking into account the programmed experience, but networked games mean that user interactions are as much a part of the experience as visuals, storyline, etc.

Many players agree that "trash talk" is an inevitable (even necessary) part of networked games, but there is debate as to whether there's a line between trash talk and inappropriate racism, sexism, and homophobia. Many users seem to believe trash talk should be "shaken off" or should not count past the original interaction.

While games studies work on racism, sexism, and homophobia in user interactions has been lacking, users themselves have forums designed to promote solidarity and speaking up for marginalized groups.

Video games studies need to focus on who is playing games (beyond the white male geek), why they are playing (pleasure or addiction?), what they are playing ('hardcore' games or 'casual' mobile phone/social games), and how gamers and games interactive to create texts/discourses/experiences/communities.

[adventuresintheory]

When technology becomes an extension of our senses, capabilities, and bodies, it does not always do so for the good. Ntozake Shange, author of the famous play “For Colored Girls”, has suffered from multiple strokes and debilitating neurological disorder, making writing and reading difficult and periodically impossible. In this New York Times article, she talks about how her attempts to use technology to help her write have been fraught in class and race-based ways: “Spell-check ruins my work,” she said. “It fixes all my slang and dialect into standard English. So I’m caught in a tangle of technology that feels very foreign to me. My characters don’t talk necessarily in a normal American way of talking. They talk a little different. So I’m having a struggle with the grammar”. For Shange, technology does not provide a suitable "wearable body organ" -- it hasn't been programmed to help her and is not meant for someone of her positionality to achieve the kind of goals she aims for.

[adventuresintheory]

Kelly Dobson, AgoraPhone (2002)

Kelly Dobson's work is extremely reminiscent of that seemingly every-present figure of the cyborg. ScreamBody isn’t exactly making the wearer a blend of human and machine, but Dobson describes it as a “Wearable Body Organ”. It is meant to fulfill a bodily need that there is no “natural” organ for, a fundamental need for expression that becomes a problem because of the built human environments and social structures, so Dobson fixes it with more human-built ingenuity. Similarly, AgoraPhone becomes almost a “Wearable Body Organ” for the public “body”. It serves a need for expression, from individual to individual in a public space or from an individual to a public group -- it is a mouth for the amorphous being that is a public (a being inherently formed through a combination of human and media/technology -- maybe the public is the cyborg?).

[adventuresintheory]

Programmed Visions, "1: Invisibly Visible, Visibly Invisible", Wendy Chun (2011)

Wendy Chun is a professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her work focuses on technology, the internet, and society and their interactions with/influences on race and gender.

"Invisibly Visible, Visibly Invisible" Summary

The proliferation of digital images (which, because of their impermanence/potential to be manipulated, cannot be trusted) is paradoxically accompanied by a sense of technology causing transparency and facilitating knowledge (even as the knowledge that is gathered by technology is often about us and yet inaccessible to us and even as the way technology functions becomes less and less transparent).

Source code has come to be considered as logos, “as true representation of action,” (19) while actually further obscuring the inner workings of the machine (this shift allows software to exist).

Software exists within power structures and must engage with them, although it does so in different ways, whether the software is ‘good’ (free, open source) or ‘bad’ (Microsoft).

Code is considered to be “the first language that does what it says” and to be performative in a similar though deeper sense to such phrases as “I now pronounce you husband and wife” (22), but these interpretations not only anthropomorphize code but treat it as “inherently executable, conflating meaning and action,” (23). Source code is not the same as executable code, however, as it must be compiled, combined with software libraries, added to by the operating system, and so on. Source code only becomes a the source of an action after it has been translated/transformed/destroyed. Further, code isn’t necessarily needed to make hardware do an action — they can be hardwired.

The desire to be able to map power (simply, at all) is behind the drive to call code inherently executable. Chun suggests the computer as a metaphor through which the user can navigate neoliberal power structures — computers contain internal bureaucracies that mirror external ones and must follow a set of rules that programmers must also follow. If code can be logos, then it can be a solution to “neoliberal chaos,” (29).

Programming languages have their origin in the military commands given to the women operators who were treated as a part of the machine, but some of whom later became analysts and coders (and have been called ‘the first programmers’) themselves. However, reclaiming these women as feminist icons (and even as ‘the first programmers’) ignores the power structures built into coding (those who write specifications vs those who code them vs those who translate them into notated machine code).

In moves from machine code to automatic programming to further and further levels of abstraction, democratization of programming is coupled with a further obfuscation of the inner workings of the computer.

Coding has become easy to start learning and see immediate results (“Hello, World!”), which makes it dangerous and seductive. It becomes a fetish because of its potential for pleasure and power. Like a fetish, code “is a conversion of event into location—time into space—that does affect things, though not necessarily in the manner prescribed,” (53).

[adventuresintheory]

This video shows the extensive work that goes into transforming “normal” women into advertisements. Photoshop functions very similarly to the imaging tools Balsamo describes — allowing the user to take a photograph and morph it into an ideal — and it has a very similar function. Like the patients who seemed to believe that what they saw on the screen was what they would get (what they deserved to get, what they needed to get) once they were post-operative, we see images like the final product here on a daily basis in commercials and ads and are hoodwinked, over and over again, into believing that this is the body we should possess — could possess, if we worked a little harder and bought the right products.

But our ideal is nothing more than a gendered, technologized construction. Would we call the image at the end of this video a woman? Would we call her a cyborg? After all, she is created through a combination of the natural and the technological, but she hardly defies gender; on the contrary, she emphatically reaffirms it. Similarly, she reveals and upholds whiteness and beauty, and how the two are so intertwined in our culture.

[adventuresintheory]

"On the Cutting Edge: Cosmetic Surgery and the Technological Production of the Gendered Body", Anne Balsamo (1997)

Anne Balsamo is a professor of media studies at The New School. She has been heavily involved in the digital humanities and also co-founded FemTechNet. Her research and creative interests include cultural studies, biotechnologies, and digital media.

"On the Cutting Edge" Summary

Cosmetic surgery and the visualizing tools used by surgeons fragment the female body, marking the parts as flawed or sick. The "clinical eye" is a privileged gaze, a medicalizing gaze, which becomes a technological gaze.

Cosmetic surgery is invested in cultural norms -- the body that has been operated on is transformed into a production of culture. Also, whether reconstructive or elective, cosmetic surgeons must make decisions about what is preferable, acceptable, healthy, beautiful, etc. These decisions are informed by and inform cultural notions of beauty. Thus, the far more common discussion of white faces/features is wound up in beauty norms that privilege whiteness.

Cosmetic surgery is simultaneously presented as elective and curative by patients and doctors alike. It is also simultaneously unnatural or vain and naturalized or simply part of the modern beauty regimen.

In narratives about plastic surgery (pro and con), women's bodies are presented as inherently flawed, pathological, in need of upkeep and repair, produced while men who go to plastic surgeons do not have their bodies treated in this way and are allowed to have professional reasons for getting surgery.

Video imaging software that allows surgeons to manipulate pictures of patients to create potential "after" photos are useful for consultation, explanation, and marketing (seeming to be "on the cutting edge"), but also cannot account for how tissue heals and creates unrealistic expectations in patients by hampering their ability to "distinguish between the real, the possible, and the likely".

Cosmetic surgery can uphold oppressive gendering of bodies and can be chosen for oppressive readings, but it can also serve as "fashion surgery" similar to piercings or tattoos. It represents women taking control of their bodies and how they will be perceived.

[adventuresintheory]

As is often the case when seemingly stable boundaries (human/artificial, life/death, nature/culture) are displaced by technological innovation, other boundaries are more vigilantly guarded. Indeed, the gendered boundary between male and female is one border that remains heavily guarded despite new technologized ways to rewrite the physical body in the flesh. So that it appears that while the body has been recoded within discourses of biotechnology and medicine as belonging to an order of culture rather than of nature, gender remains a naturalized point of human identity.

Anne Balsamo, "On the Cutting Edge: Cosmetic Surgery and the Technological Production of the Gendered Body" (1997)

[adventuresintheory]

Accessibility, Art, and the Internet

Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" heralded art created to be reproduced as a way to get art to the masses. While reproductions or pictures of statues and paintings could be circulated to the general population, the original works and the "aura" that they held were reserved for a privileged few, but with the advent of "copies without an original", the elite would no longer be able to claim special access or ownership of art.

The internet accelerates and intensifies this process -- anyone with an internet connection and some basic tools can make and view a wide variety of web-based art. Digital art is truly without aura -- there is no apparent difference between a Microsoft Paint comic strip saved on the computer it was originally created on, uploaded to Imgur, or downloaded from Imgur and saved on a computer half-way across the world. Shu Lea Cheang's art works are internet installations and internet performance art, allowing for the accessibility without necessarily the reproducibility; at least, not these works are not reproducible as the comic described above is or as Benjamin describes, yet they defy aura.

Shu Lea Cheang's BRANDON has been taken down and is undergoing "restoration", making it completely inaccessible except through screenshots. The similarity to sculptures and paintings accessible to many only through pictures that hardly do them justice is striking. What restoration means for internet art (what archiving means, what viewing and even the viewer mean for internet art) is somewhat hazy, as is whether Shu Lea Cheang's work and it's ambiguous reproducibility/accessibility confirms or denies Benjamin's theory.