Hello Avatar

Hello Avatar: From Virtual Worlds to X-Reality
Beth Coleman
MIT Press 2010

Hello Avatar provides a comprehensive look at contemporary uses of virtual world and augmented reality platforms. It addresses the recent (2004-2008) public interest in virtual worlds— three-dimensional interactive online platforms— that has moved the subject beyond research lab and niche-user communities. Hello Avatar walks the reader through several virtual world platforms, giving the book's audience a first-hand experience of this new medium. These immersive narrations are interwoven with media history and theory, creating a broader discussion of emergent media practice and its cultural consequences. Hello Avatar focuses on virtual world use and design in relation to the broader topic of networked subjectivity. As cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener and media theorist Marshall McLuhan have historically argued, media use changes the user. With each shift in automation, simulation, and transmission, we discover not only new technologies but also new facets of ourselves. In Hello Avatar, I argue that real-time processes and copresence (presence at a distance) in mediated communication have fundamentally changed the experience of place, location, and self. I provide examples of an emergent ubiquitous computing that bring virtuality into the everyday experiences of the real world.

x-reality

Cross-reality or x-reality is defined as the implementation of an informational or media exchange between real-world and virtual-world (computer simulation) systems. The basic contention of x-reality is that it affects worlds real and virtual. In other words, x-reality platforms have a meaningful and discernable effect upon the world. In my research on the subject, I look at unprecedented emergence of synchronous communication applications and information visualization design.
(PDF)

Geofilm: Paris Mapping

Artists Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand, USA
Recollets Installation, supported by Mayor's office of the City of Paris
Residency July-September, 2009
Installation/public view September 17-20, 2009

The Geofilm Project creates a distributed movie across a cityscape. The films, which are in traditional projection formats as well as geoloctive (online) media, are placed in various locations for viewers to discover. For the Recollet residency, the project focuses on the site of the city itself, developing an evocative map of short film and networked media across various sites. We see this project as bringing together an aesthetics of temporality and location in regard to the visual medium of film as well as addressing new potentials in interactive technologies, including locative media. The exhibition of the piece would be an installation that combines multiple locations across the city.

As artists, we see this project as mashing up aspects of locative media, ubiquitous computing, and the emergent art form of interactive cinema. The technology around locative media is part of the discussion of the presentation, but equally as importantly is the conversation about this moment of open horizons: we are helping to create a new art form well beyond cinema. What's amazing about this moment of artistic expression is the heightened exchange between artist and audience. What we weave together with the Geofilm project is a multi-modal art practice, including sculptural form, time-based media, sound design, site-specific concerns, and new technologies.

About Recollets
Recollets is an old monastery in the 10th arrondissement of Paris that was turned unto a contemporary art space a few years ago. It is supported by the Mayor's Office of the City of Paris in its mission to bring artists whose work has been internationally recognized to Paris for a three-month residency. The visibility of the Geofilm project would be high impact for an art, fashion, and music audience. The young people already engaging mobile technologies as well as the broader audience that the Mayor's Office of the City of Paris brings to the Recollets projects present a rich demographic of media users and culture leaders. http://www.international-recollets-paris.org/accueil-en.php

About the Artists
The New York-based artists Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand began collaborating in 1995 with the SoundLab Cultural Alchemy project, a nomadic, multi-media installation and event (www.soundlab.org soundlab.org/waken). Coleman and Goldkrand work with diverse materials including sculpture, installation, sound, code, and text. Their collaborative and individual projects have been exhibited internationally in venues such as Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1 Museum of Contemporary Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Mirror's Edge international exhibition, James Cohan Gallery, the Venice Biennale 2004, ARC/Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris among others. Coleman is currently a professor of new media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

This project is supported by MIT-France alliance

Race as Technology

Race as technology presents an ongoing investigation of how we think about the role of race in changing cultural conditions. The proposition of race as technology moves race away from the biological and genetic systems that have historically dominated its definition toward questions of technological agency. Technological agency speaks to the ways by which external devices help us navigate the terrain in which we live.

Is it possible to think of race as a disinterested object of our delight, as opposed to one that is overinscribed? Can race survive as something other than the remnant of a traumatic history? Race as technology tells the tale of the levered mechanism. Imagine a contraption with a spring or a handle that creates movement and diversifies articulation. Not a trap, but rather a trapdoor through which one can scoot off to greener pastures. As an object of history, race has been used as a contraption by one people to subject another. An ideological concept of race such as this carries a very practical purpose. It vividly and violently produces race-based terrorism, systems of apartheid, and demoralizing pain. A notion of race as technology, however, moves toward an aesthetic category of human being, where mutability of identity, reach of individual agency, and conditions of culture all influence each other.
(PDF)

Machinima workshop

Coleman continues research on machinima (real-time animation), using game engines. The image is a shot of the Cute Robot Army, part of a machinima course in consortium with Parsons graduate design program.