Bad Men, Good Men and the Data Ganger Cometh
Symposium:
- ISEA98: Ninth International Symposium on Electronic Art
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More presentations from ISEA98:
Session Title:
- Paradiso Artificiale Rehearsals for Death: Avators and the Post-Biological Experience
Presentation Title:
- Bad Men, Good Men and the Data Ganger Cometh
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Ever since internet chat has become popular, the majority of chat users have indulged in the anonymity it provides and enjoyed the most adventurous yet safe way of socialization that has ever happened to mankind, role playing is no longer the actors’ privilege and cross gender internet romance become everyday soap opera. The introduction of 3D chat worlds and avatars have even further transformed the abstraction of anonymity: the way people use avatars does not swear by the quintessence of identification but the potential of metamorphosis.
The authors followed a group of teenagers and recorded their avatar behaviors in an attempt to explore the degree that gender myth have effects on the way boys and girls choose avatars to represent themselves. Apart from the usual courting process, teenagers incline to control over the look of their avatars, they like to pick and mix the body parts, not dissimilar to the ways they dressed their Barbie dolls and Action Men a few years back. Except that Barbies now like to wear Ken’s clothes and have mohican hair! If avatar is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events, does it mean that our world has evolved into an ultimate state of transvestism?
