World of Female Avatars an Artistic Online Survey on the Female Body in Times of Virtual Reality (original) (raw)
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Possibly there is no topic more discussed in both feminist art and feminist philosophy today than " the body. " This interest represents continued explorations and critiques of mind-body dualism and the role of sexual morphology in the development of gender and the self. Particularly, the use of 'body' in art, whether is visually or conceptually, that have been popularized by women artists from time to time, from the era of feminist art until now in contemporary era, where the women artists have already move on from feminist to post-feminist ideology. Throughout this study about the usage of body in art and historical research about women artists, the author came to a conclusion that the visualization of body in art that are made by women artists were always have a conceptual meaning and agenda about femininity. Being one of the women artists herself, the author feels the need to reflect this idea of body in art to her own body and mind as to create a whole new idea about the body of women in art, in a very personal way of telling and purpose. In this final project, the author try to present a research that narrates an adaptation and compliance process that happen when a woman realizes the subjectivity of her body as a media to translate the beauty of her intellectuality and emotions of her soul, coincide with the fact that the women body will always be objectified in consumption of visual culture, that only see the physical beauty but not what is within.
Body, Space & Technology
INTER/her: Intimate Journey inside the FemaleBody isan immersive installation and Virtual Reality artwork focussing onpost-reproductive diseases that for women over 30 can often experience,including: endometriosis, fibroids, polyps, ovarian and other cysts, as well asmore serious cervical, ovarian, uterine and endometrial cancers. The project isan intimate immersive exploration of the inner world of women’s bodies and thereproductive diseases they can suffer. The focus of INTER/her is onfemale health is intended as a personal exploration, conversation starter, andcommunity builder. This article discusses the creative methods, design process,and tools for making the multimodal interaction used in INTER/her,exploring their nature, value, and significance within the project, and whatthey implicate for future work in this area of art, design and research. Itwill discuss the making, expression and narrative elements used to represent,explore, and understand the emotional and bodily/senso...
Virtual Bodies: Representations of Gender & Sexuality in the Virtual Space
Virtual reality (VR) is a term that identifies computer generated environments that involves various forms and levels of interaction and immersion with the users’ position and surroundings. Originally inspired by science fiction, today virtual reality is commonly used in entertainment industry, in tactical combat stimulations, medicine, psychology and aviation. With a revenue of products that is expected to reach 5.2 billion USD in 2018 and a dramatic rise of users from 6.7 Million in 2015 to 43 Million user in 2016 (Statista, 2016) VR platforms manifests themselves as a mecca for a wide range of users from teenagers to 40+ users where everyone can exist in their own forms (a.k.a Avatars or Aliases). VR and Augmented Reality (AR) applications form a type of Heterotopia that Foucault described as seemingly open spaces, where the only initiated body can access (Vidler; Foucault; Johnston, 2014, p.22). From gaming, chat rooms, to artworks; initiation options vary in hardware from PCs (46% of users in 2016), to Gaming Consoles (28% of users in 2016) to Mobile (26% of users in 2016). Its projection also extend to real world communities, real life relationships, and a separate virtual economy; VR and AR are topics that raises many questions on the political, economic, social and theoretical level, that deserves analysis and study. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) as the founding fields that creates VR has long been dominated by males, Cyberfeminism and Cyborg feminism were theories that revolutionized the way we see gender in technology; Cyberfeminism emerged out of the awareness to the male dominance of technology, and encouraged ‘women’ to engage more with technology. It had two opinions within: One that favored existing outside the label of feminisms seeking the push for more knowledge of new media technologies as is, and the other that saw critical participation that surpasses the call for “all girls need modems” (Consalvo, 2003, p.2) as crucial to not only be an active participant of decision and policy making, but also to be able to utilize the mediums and tools we have to help everyone outside the Western, White, Technologically Privileged population online and offline (Consalvo, 2012). On another side stood Cyborg Feminism with the foundational work “A Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway, 1991), that discussed the human-machine symbiosis, abolishing all boundaries of sex and gender, to establish the multi-gendered, multi-sexed, and non-binary “Cyborg”. This also opens the door for the role of corporeality and gender by Judith Butler (Butler, 1990), and the similarity between the fluid geographic nature of VR and fluid representations of its inhabitants. The paper the debates and previous discussion a topic that is relatively new in theoretical discussions; this paper tries to explore various gender theories and technology with focus on virtual realm, it explores various forms of virtual spaces, various gender and sexuality representations in them, and whether or not they are manifested in the same way real life is. It argues that virtual reality as a realm of parallel existence, as a heterotopic realm can be as space of amplifying the sexual representational norms that exists in real life, and yet also manage to create its own rule of the game. It uses the world of “Second life” as a focus of study, both by the author of the paper, or by other studies conducted on Second Life population.
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2016
One of the tropes of these early years of the twenty-first century is that of the avatar, a virtual representation of a human being used for entertainment , educational, technical, or scientific purposes. The avatar is a product of digital culture, but its origins are coeval with those of the human being and its evolution is affected by material conditions and the level of technology currently achieved by a given society. The origin of the word " avatar " has a spiritual connotation: It was associated with Hinduism and used to describe a deity who took a terrestrial form. More generally, however, whether in terms of religion or computing, we could define the avatar as a surrogate, a body—real or virtual—that replaces another. The origins of the avatar in Western societies date back to the modern era, which was founded on mechanical technology and marked by the birth of urban culture. At that time, between the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a typical surrogate for the human body was the mannequin. Mannequins were displayed in shopping windows, bearers of fashion trends and styles. They later became a symbol of conformity that reached a peak under totalitarian governments, embodying those values of efficiency that put the human body on the same level as machines, both the machine of industrial production and the war machine. As a substitute, the mannequin in society played a purely functional role, taking the place of the human body in activities that the human being, out of dignity or resistance, wouldn't perform. These included mannequins used for commercial purposes as well as those later used for testing in the automotive industry and military engineering. Other mannequins, meanwhile, had a completely different fate: They became the subject of photographs and paintings, employed as cultural artifacts, fetishes or symbols of a mass culture that artists were either fascinated by or wanted to criticize.
Excursions into Female Portraiture
Female portraiture in both possible senses, of portraits representing female subjects and of women portraitists, or self-portraitists, with reference to their works. In the history of art, even in ancient mythology and anecdotage, not seldom female beauty assumed an extensive symbolic value, or else the mimesis turned into an allegorical "methexis".
The Body: From Virtual Avatar to Plastic Surgery
eWic of the British Computer Society, 2019
From Photoshop to plastic surgery there lies a transaction of reality from the virtual to the actual; from digital image manipulation to physical body sculpting, a distance for explosion. What imploded in the virtual in the form of fantasy has now returned in the form of violent corporal mutation. This is a commodification of the human body, the plastic body as such, is the perfect body that everybody achieved with Photoshop and other image manipulation software in virtual reality and that has reached the physiological body with the augmentation tools of medical technologies, The human body is now reproduced following a set of standards, measurements and beauty references to fit under one of the pre-set categories dictated by the mass culture. The result of this computed type of production is an unprecedented uniformity. Everybody looks like everybody now, in actual reality there is a set of categories that each group of people fits in exactingly. This capitalist culture industry of mass production is still triumphant today but with new, more powerful, technologies of augmentation that are employed to facilitate this corporal metamorphosis. This implies that something went wrong in the use of new technologies. Today the production of sameness is more then ever locking us towards a catastrophic image of mass-produced disfigured bodies where violence persists as the main patent of post virtual-reality image.