Shamar's Machinima Video Outline

IRS Machinima Video

The techniques of machinima creation will aid me in creating an abstract art video that celebrates ecstatic movement as a common language capable of uniting people across barriers and showing our common humanity. Real world dancers and avatars will dance in extended spaces that overlap real world environments with virtual ones. I will explore these spaces within the context of community building and consciousness raising. Thus, a spectrum of environments will be explored. Some will acknowledge the planetary wisdom of ancestors connected to the land. Others will reveal present day environments which have been mistreated. On one end of the spectrum, themes of global warming, pollution, war, and hunger will be explored. On the other end, a positive future will be imagined. Through it all, the wisdom of people who have come before and been stewards of the land will be respected. These environments will be explored through movement.


Steps:

I.

Film Shamar's avatar dancing in natural setting in second life - ocean, forest, stream, sky
Film Shamar's avatar dancing in polluted environments in second life - trash dumps, corporate logo environments, dark desolate places, online protest sites
Film Shamar's avatar dancing with other avatars in environments that represent a positive imagining of the future


II.
Download clips of films/ pictures that show bombs, guns, death, hunger, destruction
Download clips of films/ pictures that show positive imaginings of the future

III.
Film dancers in environments around Gainesville

IV.
Create text that honors ancestor voices

V.
Use Isadora to create a video that combines all of this.

Ancient Avatars

Costumes of Slaves or Serfs, from the Sixth to the Twelfth Centuries.
Did they have a life then?

Mixed Realities

I think that this and other examples illustrate quite well a quote I read recently by Richard Purcell (former chief privacy officer at Microsoft) stating that "Technology is way ahead of our ability as a society to think about the consequences"

On a related note (everything is related, I know) an article in the Washington Post about the recent annual Toy Fair in NY, dated February 20, 2008; p.C01 says:

Fact: Kids create more than 100,000 avatars each day in virtual communities such as Habbo and Club Penguin. That startling statistic has broad implications for how kids play and what the $22 billion toy industry wants to sell them to play with.

...For the (toy) industry, which uses this four-day play date to hawk its current and upcoming products, here's the best-case scenario: Kids won't want to stop playing in their online worlds. With the ever-expanding child obesity problem, that also is the worst-case scenario.

Of course, worst-case scenarios make for some of the best business opportunities (e.g. 9/11). That is why you see and will see more and more, a strong linkage from RL to VR as you already have with toys such as Build-a-Bear which uses the virtual world, where children play a controlled fantasy using an avatar of their toy bear, to model their consumer behavior (and their parent's) therefore bouncing back to RL where the child now sees his/her bear as lacking those things which they so easily get online.

More worrying to me is the fact that those kids forfeit their imaginary role and fantasy playing by succumbing to a pre-canned experience. This might have implications for the development of true free-form creativity in the child. And no matter how emphatically the toy companies insist their "privacy policy" protects your children, the fact is that kids activities online are closely monitored by those same companies, so that while individual privacy might be moderately protected (very weakly I would argue) their group as a whole becomes a very vulnerable and exploited target.