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Articles Conference Reviews |
2009ELacey7Session E7: Ubiquitous Composing: Play and Identity in Material Worlds Hannah Bellwoar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Amber Buck, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Lauren Marshall Bowen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Jenica Roberts-Stanley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign At the start of her presentation, Bellwoar introduced the notion of play and identity, particularly identity through the manipulation of plastic surgery. Plastic surgeons, often advertising with dramatic before and after photos, utilize computer technologies during individual consults to examine the reconstructive possibilities. However, these computer-imaging programs symbolize not only violence against bodies, but illustrate the ubiquitous collaboration between bodies and texts as bodies become the text. Two clips were played from the F/X series Nip/Tuck, a show whose two main characters are plastic surgeons. In the scenes, Dr. Christian Troy marks up his patients’ bodies with lipstick, directly making them as a text that needs to be “corrected.” Most often viewers of the show never see the patients post-op, they are only viewed as mistakes that need to be fixed. On the other hand, the computer imaging software does not ‘correct’ explicitly, but instead demonstrates what Bellwoar terms serious play: it redefines reality and consequences. Bellwoar argues that the computer images unfortunately make it difficult for patients to believe that they will not look exactly like what the technologies say they will. Stevie Ryan, the Los Angeles actress who created and plays the YouTube hit character ‘Lil Loca,’ caused some controversy when it was revealed that Ryan, whose character thrives on Latino stereotypes, is actually not a Latina herself. In her presentation, Buck explores the difficulties of performing authentic identities in online spaces and uses Lil Loca as her main example. Relying on Sherry Turkle, Buck notes that an individual can perform multiple tasks simultaneously in online spaces while having separate identities from our online bodies. Therefore Stevie Ryan (who is Caucasian in real life) can perform as Lil Loca (who is Latina online). To illustrate the supposed increasing transparency of online spaces, Buck showed the Far Side comic strip with two dogs hovering in front of a computer with one saying to the other, “Online, no one knows you’re a dog!” countered by a remixed version which boasts, “Online, everyone knows you’re a dog!” Even though Ryan has received some criticism for her portrayal of Lil Loca, this has not slowed the amount of views of her videos receive—her popularity has even prompted some spin-offs as well as rebuttals from angry fans. Finally, Buck noted that rather than simply watching Lil Loca, the reaction towards her character has transformed viewers from simple voyeurism into an active relationship with online texts. Bowen opened up her presentation by providing a background of G, an elderly woman who was the main focus of this paper. G worked at a paper mill in the 1940s and was promoted to a manager within the company, a position that would rid her of the need for her personal typewriter. G retained her typewriter, and Bowen argues that this move symbolized G’s inability to separate her writing body from her working body—she was rewriting her female body as a manager. Upon her retirement later in her life, G became interested in scrap booking, a hobby that she completed by hand but eventually switched to using the photo-sharing site, Flickr. Bowen argues that G was able to leap to new media because of her familiarity with the older ones. Just as she took her typewriter with her to her new managerial position, taking the physical scrapbook with her to her online space emphasizes the intermediation between texts and genres. Roberts-Stanley interrogates two characteristics of the body in relation to the film Beowulf: the body filmic and the body textual. When Zemeckis made the film Beowulf, he hooked up the cast to computerized sensors that would capture the movement of the actors. However, he did not use live action shots themselves, but rather used the images from the sensors to create “the essence of the actor into the body of the character.” Roberts-Stanley played a few clips from the DVD extras about the making of the film that, as she argued, educated the audience about the elaborate game on how bodies are manipulated. Further, Roberts-Stanley stated that there is a hard line between education and play in the texts since it is a co-production between multiple agents (i.e. the film crew, computer engineers, actors, viewers). |