Gender Perceptions in “My Body”

April 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Shelley Jackson’s My Body — A Wunderkammer is ripe with ideas relating to gender and identity.  She addresses various aspects of femininity/masculinity in a manner which calls our attention to gender binaries. The work ultimately challenges and subverts these binaries, I think — celebrating the body for its flaws and deficiencies as well as its strengths and beauties.   The text, however, is filled with insecurities regarding body image; specifically insecurities and conflicts which arise from her more stereotypically masculine traits.

Those traits — her muscular, football player arms and shoulders, for one example, are often described in relation to monstrosity.  Jackson writes that her body is “just one jot off a Frankenstein monster.”  She writes about having her gender interrogated by her peers when she was younger and wishing for “a third restroom, the one for monsters and hermaphrodites.” She occupies a space of otherness in her feelings of monstrosity and mixed femininity and masculinity, which provokes the reader to reconsider what these binaries mean and how they may shape our experience of the world.

Her discussions of body hair are another way that she frames this other space, as conventional gender binaries cast men as hairy, women as hairless.  She illustrates her struggle between rebellion and conformity in her discussions of her leg hair, saying “I shaved my leg hair defensively, I grew it back dogmatically, I shaved it guiltily, I grew it back proudly, I shaved it experimentally, I grew it back humorously.”  Her ever shifting attitudes as she grows up reflect her constant negotiation of the societal norms which influence the conception of gender.

And yet there is a curious disconnect between her accounts of feeling monstrous, her descriptions of the body as a cabinet of wonders, and her interwoven depictions of the body as a subject for art.  The artistic gaze creates a view of the body as something simultaneously strange and familiar; it also offers a space to disconnect from societal perceptions.  She writes that “drawing is an antidote to judgement,” where the process of thoroughly seeing and noticing the individual elements of the human body demands a kind of understanding not readily given in much of societal interaction.

Even in this there is conflict, and she acknowledges that she is herself susceptible to all the varying reactions a person may have towards the body — desire, disgust, curiosity, and so on.  The work describes the continuous process of coming to know and understand one’s own body, and how that body is read by others.  She offers up her own body for exploration, for an interrogation that is somewhat reminiscent of the locker room interrogations she recounts.  But it is an important shift that she gives it willingly, in her own words with her own explorations and explanations, rather than in a defensive  attempt to prove her worth and identity.  This offering is ultimately a way of reclaiming her body and celebrating its reality outside of constraining gender binaries, pushing us to consider how often these binaries fall short of more complete truths.

 

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“Now Hug Yer Brain and Keep Playing:” Deciphering Jason Nelson

March 29, 2012 by 1 Comment

Playing Jason Nelson’s games/art creations felt like my brain was being assaulted. It is messy, often incoherent, and destabilizing in many ways. I read that chaos as a way of mimicking both the overwhelming amount of information that is accessible in the age of the internet and the overwhelming amount of “choices” we have as consumers in a capitalist society. Further, the chaos is ultimately meant to critique these elements of society by forcing the reader/player to decipher some sort of meaning from the work. I’ll focus here primarily on “i made this. you play this. we are enemies.” because I think it is the clearest of Nelson’s games. (If it is even possible to use the word clear in relation to Nelson.)

The overtones of consumer culture are evident from the beginning. The opening level — “Monopoland” — is littered with the words “buy,” “sell,” and “soap.” The sound effects include repetitive cash register noises. The video clip shows a street where there are racks of clothing out for sale. “i made this…” doesn’t stop at just the consumption of physical goods however; Nelson goes on to explore the consumption of information and art. To narrow this down to just three of the websites which form the background of each level — there’s Google, for navigating the massive amount of information on the internet; Disney, a mass producer of art; and the RIAA, as the regulator for the consumption of art. None of these go without critique:

We’re presented a vision of “Google culture,” which Nelson seems to suggest is responsible for supplanting a desire to learn things through experience in favor of a “soft ad sleep.”   Rather than choosing to go to a new place and learn or explore (as we are urged to do in Nelson’s instructions), his “soft ad sleep” suggests again a life/identity built out of consumption rather than any authentic exploration or decision-making.  This lack of autonomy is suggested over and over again.  For just one example I’ll point to one moment where the player moves through a portal and the message “now you’re here spoonfed” (or something similar) pops up.

I found the critique of Disney especially interesting.  The cartoon characters cause the player to die if they cross paths, casting Disney’s “secretly dull cartoons” as enemies in the game.  This idea of “secretly dull cartoons,” coupled with another one of the flashing messages (“You’ve been disney’fied” or something to that effect) points toward Disneyfication of culture — a diluting of ideas/art where everything negative is stripped away or masked; a homogenizing process meant to appeal to the masses, prompt more consumption, and generate more profit.

With his comments on the RIAA, who I take to be the “they” who “sleep on beds filled with the lunch money of 100,00 poor teens” Nelson critiques the consumerist culture born out of capitalism as something which is fueled by a rather inhumane kind of greed.

That Nelson’s scribbles, poetry and animations flash over these websites is important. Not only do they give the player a starting point for interpretation, they also provide the starting text for what becomes a barely legible palimpsest.  With each new layer of chaos, Nelson puts us in a space more and more distant from our everyday experiences of these same spaces, challenging us to question what we might otherwise not stop to think about.  The aesthetic reminds me of blackout poetry — a process of creation somewhat counterintuitively done via deletion/destruction.  It is this rewriting through destruction that challenges us to question these aspects of the world and create our own interpretation from the chaos.

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Creative Project — Fainting

March 15, 2012 by 1 Comment

There have been so many well-done electronic lit projects that came out of the creative assignment.  I want to share my own, and I will, though it comes with the disclaimer “not yet finished”.  From a different perspective, this translates to “My project was a mess, was really a huge failure.”  But I only say this because that failure has been more illuminating than making a perfectly polished piece with little struggle.  I worked in Inform 7, and as I’m sure many of us came to see, it is challenging – even infuriating at times – to figure out how to build the world you want for the story.  What ended up happening was this.

My idea was to have the player character feel exhausted, drift off to sleep, and “wake up” in their dream, where the dream world itself would be the main focus of the story. I had coded part of an elaborate maze that the character would have to solve in the dream world, then went back to the story’s starting point only to realize I had no idea how to transition the character from the real world to the dream world in terms of I7 coding.   I found some information on this, though it wasn’t quite what I had in mind, and worked off an example in one of the manuals for how to change states.  The version of the project here doesn’t even go into the dream world, because the introductory part alone ended up at around 1000 words and the deadline drew ever closer (made even more frantic by my initial failure at Inform, frustrated try at Twine, then return to Inform), and I was only about a fifth of the way through the story I had planned.

I wanted the conversational depth of a piece like Galatea, the almost maze-like quality of  Colossal Cave Adventure, the surrealism with which ordinary objects behave abnormally in Shade. These were all so well done that I didn’t think seriously enough about how enormous each task would be.  My respect for the amount of work, skill and thought that has to go into each piece of IF has gone through the roof after trying to understand the basics about how the coding/creative process works in something like Inform. I was entirely unfamiliar with text adventures before the beginning of this class, and it took me ages to get through some of the first ones we read.  After looking at them in terms of their coding, I feel I can navigate them a bit better.  Further, I am much more appreciative of a certain openness that comes with IF after these attempts — I can open up the source text of Galatea to see how Emily Short built her amazingly complex conversation paths; I can open the source of Shade and gather clues about how to make objects work in ways more suited to surrealism — that kind of openness regarding the crafting of interactive fiction is a beautiful thing.

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The Art of Sleep: Kinetic Typography and Speed

February 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

We’ve already had quite a few posts on Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, ranging from a comparison with punk aesthetics to an assertion that YHCHI could be viewed as neo-Beat.  Both of these touch on what I was most fascinated by in DAK0TA: the speed of the text, moving so fast that the viewer can hardly keep a fast enough reading pace.  As punk, the speed recall’s the movements fast-tempo music; as Beat, it recalls Kerouac’s spontaneous prose (or even, I would argue, some of Ginsberg’s more rambling poetry).  However you look at, the speed of the words in DAK0TA, set to their quick jazz rhythm, seems to overtake the piece.  We are not as concerned with content, because the text moves so quickly that we may not even be able to comprehend it all, and are left instead with vague, peripheral impressions.

So how might kinetic typography use a different kind of rhythm, a different pace?  What might this difference in speed do to the way I approach the works of YHCHI?  These questions brought me to another work by YHCHI — THE ART 0F SLEEP, a piece commissioned by the Tate Gallery.

The premise is this: the narrator cannot sleep, and while wondering why, takes us through a long (18 minutes or so) thought-monologue on the nature of art.   Is art futile?  Can art solve world problems?  Can everything be art?  The narrator answers with a resounding: “ART IS EVERYTHING.” THE ART 0F SLEEP contrasts well with DAK0TA; in comparison, the former is downright ponderous and meditative.  It goes by slowly enough that the viewer has enough time to read it fully at a comfortable pace, and sometimes slow enough that there are small (very small, I’m talking seconds; this isn’t painfully slow) moments to begin to reflect on the statements. There is a sprinkling of restlessness — appropriate to an insomniac narrator — primarily conveyed through the speed of the text flashing by.  Near the end of the piece, the narrator lists begins to list off, alphabetically, everything that could be considered art, and there is an increase in speed here too. The slower pace still plays with a sense of spontaneity and seems primarily meant to reflect the rambling kind of syntax that feels natural for an interior monologue.

 

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All Roads: Interactive Fiction and Experiments with Perspective

January 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Consciousness is slowly returning to you.  You wake, but are then suddenly standing on a scaffold in a city square with a noose around your neck.  So begins Jon Ingold’s All Roads, with much confusion, but just as much intrigue.  It is interactive fiction in style similar to Colossal Cave Adventure and Galatea, where the reader/player enters text commands to explore and navigate the environment as well as interact with other characters.  The piece has already been blogged about here, and as Kevin notes, All Roads builds its world — Venice — with incredible attention to detail.  Unlike Galatea, where the player mainly interacts in the single room of the exhibition, the player here must navigate several environments: from escaping imprisonment in a cellar to seeking refuge in a church and wandering the city streets.

Also unlike Galatea, which offers many different paths and allows the player to explore multiple conversational styles through each replay, All Roads is a bit more confined.  You do not get to choose what you say to the characters, instead you simply enter the command to talk to them and the dialogue unfolds.  The piece is much longer than Galatea and seems to stick to a pretty rigid storyline without much variation in further playthroughs.  There is a catch, however: there are few conventional puzzles in the game and you are not forced to find all the clues you need before you move on.  I played it through to completion the first time without gathering some of the essential information and was utterly mystified by the end when I still was not sure who I was.

Yes, you read that right.  The biggest puzzle of All Roads seems to be figuring out who your character is in order to make sense of its convoluted, nonlinear plot.  As you work through the world, it becomes clear (or not so clear) that you are being hunted by assassins.  Then it seems as if you are the assassin.  My first inclination was that I was playing an assassin who was also being hunted by enemy assassins.  I could also, seemingly, time travel.  Finally, it turns out I was not so much time travelling as I was perspective travelling. The trick is that the game hinges on understanding your identity/identities, by bits and pieces, as you work through the plot.  In order to understand this, you must pay close attention to details concerning your name in certain environments: when you enter the church, for instance, you can decide to pray.  In doing so, you get a clue about your name, but it is also possible to bypass this hint altogether.

If this all sounds terribly confusing, it’s because it is. If you’re not invested enough in the world to be incredibly thorough, it will probably remain so (walkthroughs and various hints on the internet will be helpful!). But if you like your literature/games/etc of the mind-bending persuasion, it’s also quite rewarding.

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