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Amanda's Bibliography

Page history last edited by Alan Liu 11 years, 10 months ago

Annotated Bibliography Assignment

 

By Amanda Phillips, Making a Face: A Catalogue of Avatar Creation Systems

 

 1. Agamben, Giorgio. "The Face." Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vicenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2000. Print.

 

For Agamben, the face is pure communicability, “the only location of community, the only possible city” (91). The face, however, is not merely a visage, nor is a visage necessarily a face; it is the point at which language and character merge with the visage and become a point of exposure and interface with the world. Inanimate objects can have faces, but only as they encounter language: “Nature acquires a face precisely in the moment it feels that it is being revealed by language. And nature’s being exposed and betrayed by the word, its veiling itself behind the impossibility of having a secret, appears on its face as either chastity or perturbation, as either shamelessness or modesty” (92). In this way, he reveals the face as a certain human relation to the image, a relation which he claims only humans have, as animals “are always already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition” (93). Recognizing, owning, and exposing one’s own appearance are central to these facial politics. As a result, appearance is one of the most contested sites on the contemporary political battleground, a place controlled by the media, politicians, and bureaucrats to keep humans separate from the communicative potentials of their own appearance.
    In the final movement of the piece, Agamben maps several binaries onto the face: interior/exterior, proper/improper, communication/communicability, potentiality/act. The “active” terms in the binary belong to the mouth and eyes, while the “passive” ones are nose and ears. Balancing of the mouth/eyes with which he links to consumerism and totalitarianism, respectively, is the key to politics. It is only in the unity or reciprocity of these aspects of the face that we can achieve pure communicability and community - to become our faces, which is his final recommendation.

 


2. Baran, Michael D. and Michael Handelman. Guess My Race. Playtime Interactive, 2011. iOS App.

This iOS app, which was nominated for a 2011 Games for Change Festival Learning and Education Award, presents a gallery of faces to the user and asks a seemingly simple multiple-choice question: What is my race?
    While any reduction of race to a series of checkboxes has troubling implications, the app goes a long way in unpacking the different ways that people think about this aspect of their identity. The profiles are based on interviews performed with the people whose faces are shown; the “correct” answer is whichever racial identity they choose to self-identify. The introduction to the app explains that “People identify themselves in many different ways - ways that you may consider racial, ethnic, religious, or national. These people have varied reasons for answering the way they do.” In order to contextualize these responses, the interviewers asked more questions about their racial and ethnic identity. While some of the answer choices seem to purposefully trick the user, many are actually based on the responses and life experiences of the people in the pictures.
    Ultimately, the app complicates the idea that race is purely about the visual - purely about skin tone, facial features, or hair texture. The goal is not to guess the race of the person correctly; for either a correct or incorrect response, the user receives more information about racial identity, whether in the form of a quote from the pictured person, historical facts about the perception of race in different places, results of academic studies about racial identification, and even humanistic critical race theory that unpacks white privilege and insists upon the fact that people are treated differently based on visual cues no matter how they self-identify. With so many potential pitfalls in a gallery of diverse faces, this app seems to successfully navigate them by presenting a nuanced picture of race that is informed by history, policy, research, and personal experience.

 


3. Blas, Zach. "Fag Face, or How to Escape Your Face." Vimeo. 2011. Web. 10 May 2012.

 

 

In this video, queer new media artist Zach Blas explores the relationships between the face, homophobia, neoliberal governance, and technology. His Queer Technologies project is a speculative digital storefront for a high-design tech company catering to the plugged-in activist: “Queer Technologies is an organization that develops applications for queer technological agency, interventions, and social formation. We use technology to make queer weapons of resistance.” From programming anti-languages to hardware gender changers that can be found at “the Disingenuous Bar, a center for political support for technological problems, or in various consumer electronics stores such as Best Buy, Radio Shack, and Target,” Queer Technologies reproduces the design fetish of consumer culture while satirizing it with the actual functionality of their products. Each product is accompanied by an instructional video that is part essay, part  news report, and part video and sound art.
    In “Fag Face,” Blas’ unique brand of art-theory draws the audience through the history of facial recognition technologies that are implemented both as tools of law enforcement and as seemingly innocuous picture-taking aids in digital cameras. Using social science research that suggests people can recognize gays by their faces alone, Blas complicates the idea that recognition and recognizability themselves have turned existence into a weapon - calling into question movements of visibility such as the push for gay marriage. His solution, in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari, is to flee faciality and create masks that would allow queer activists to become unrecognizable. His suggestions, in the seriously playful manner of other Queer Technologies products, include fully embracing the term “fag face” by obscuring the face with sexual fluids or creating masks by adding the faces of many individuals that can emote in “radically unhuman ways.”

 


4. Fraps. v. 3.5. 2011. Beepa Pty Ltd.

 

Fraps is a free/low-cost video capture program that allows the user to record footage and take screen shots while playing games on the computer. The program currently only supports Windows XP or later, and to capture high-quality footage your computer will need substantial graphics and memory capacities. The software comes highly recommended by the machinima and gameplay recording communities, and the results achieved can be seen on the Fraps homepage or numerous YouTube and Vimeo videos on the web.

 

    The Fraps interface remains mostly in the background while you navigate the game or virtual world, with a color-coded framerate number in the top corner of the screen: yellow for not recording, red for recording. Since the interface is so minimal, Fraps uses keystroke commands to start and stop recording and to capture screenshots. The main user interface, which can be accessed on demand, offers many options for recording location, framerate options, and other considerations that a user might want to make in order to get a desirable video for a specific hardware configuration.
    The free version of Fraps is fully functional, but places a watermark on the resulting video and limits individual recording sessions to 30 seconds each. As software goes, a single license is fairly inexpensive at $37.

 


5. Mass Effect Shepard Collections

 

Farr, Denis, Guest, Gunthera1, and Rawles. "My Commander Shepard." The Border House. 2010. Web. 10 May 2012. Link.

JamieCOTC. FemShep.com. Web. 10 May 2012. Link.

sage. "The Many Faces of FemShep." YouTube. 13 Apr. 2011. Web. 10 May 2012. Link.

vesperknight. Mass Effect 2 Faces Database. Web. 10 May 2012. Link.

 

 MassEffect2Faces.com is an online database and collaborative homage to the customizable face of Commander Shepard, the hero of Bioware’s Mass Effect trilogy. Site members upload snapshots of their own renditions of Commander Shepard, along with an explanation of the inspiration behind the face, and creation codes that visitors can plug into their system to recreate the faces shown. Users create Shepards based on themselves, on significant others, on their impression of what Commander Shepard might look like based on hir voice, and the site has a large selection of celebrity-inspired Commander Shepard faces. Site users rate and comment on the faces in the database. To date, 2,570 Commander Shepards uploaded to the database.
    FemShep.com features a similar gallery of Commander Shepard faces, but this website is devoted exclusively to FemShep, the fan nickname for the female version of Commander Shepard. An homage to a character that “has forever changed the way we look at games,” FemShep.com is one of many fan interventions on Bioware’s policy of only using BroShep (the male version of Shepard) as the face of the Mass Effect series. “The Many Faces of FemShep” video, which takes many of its faces from FemShep.com, brings that critique to life with the final shot of the video: FemShep leaning in a doorway with a BroShep Game Informer Magazine cover on the wall, her voiceover proclaiming, “I’m just here to get the job done. Let someone else be on the poster.”
    The final site in this collection is The Border House’s “My Commander Shepard” series, which includes not only the requisite gallery of faces, but short narratives and reflections by the bloggers who created them. This series adds to the set because it is the only Shepard gallery to host a majority of non-white Commander Shepards. This is also the only Shepard gallery to include pictures that the bloggers chose to represent themselves - comparing the blogger to the Commander Shepard, while not an entirely useful exercise, does prompt questions about avatar identity and racial tourism as covered in the early work of Lisa Nakamura.
    Collectively, these entries represent the significant fan investment in customizable character faces and the playful and meaningful ways in which users engage with these systems. Many Commander Shepards have their own personality, backstory, and quirks to the gamers that created them, although some are empty representations brought about by playing with the facial creation tools. All of them are useful in thinking through what the multiple meanings that a gallery of faces might have.

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