Centre members have given fascinating talks at the Friday Lunchtime talks at the Pervasive Media Studio. The talks can be seen in person and are live-streamed- find out more by joining our mailing list!
24/02 ‘Virtual Life in the Metaverse: Towards a Queer Critique‘ by Dr Jacqueline Ristola. If you would like to read more about Jacqueline’s talk, check out our blog post.
17/02 The Myth of A(V)I – Artificially Voiced Intelligence by Dr Francesco Bentivegna
9/12 Digital Literacies in Brazil by Dr Edward King
We are very excited to announce the Virtual Realities as Time Travel workshop. The workshop will bring together speakers from across academic disciplines and industry to explore how users and producers of both VR experiences and historical video games conceive of journeying to the past. This will be at the University of Bristol and online on Friday 12 May 2023, 09:30-17:00.
The workshop is presented by the Virtual Reality Oracle Project team. Virtual Reality Oracle (VRO) is a first-person virtual reality experience of oracular divination at the ancient Greek oracle of Zeus at Dodona c. 465 BCE. Individuals can immerse themselves into the stories of Ancient Greek men and women as they speak to the gods. For more information, view the project website.
The programme will bring together speakers connected through the themes Virtual Realities as Time Travel, Playing with Time, Facilitating Time Travel, Connecting Past and Present, Producing Historical Experiences
For the full programme, and to reserve a place, please follow the link Ticket Tailor. We would love to see you there.
This event has been organised by Richard Cole, Research Associate in Ancient Greek History and Virtual Reality at the University of Bristol, in collaboration with Chris Bevan, Elisa Brann, Crescent Jicol and Emilia Tor and supported by both the Bristol Digital Games Lab and the Centre for Creative Technology.
Centre member Dr Jacqueline Ristola, in the Department of Film and Television, gave a fascinating talk called ‘Queering the Metaverse’ for the Friday Lunchtime talks at the PM Studio.
Beginning with the statement ‘the metaverse does not exist’, Jacqueline navigated through the trajectory of the metaverse. Continuous live connection and interactivity is promised by corporations who are trying quickly to stay ahead of the game. Facebook, rebranded as Meta, Microsoft, Roblox, Fornite are all contenders in this hyped-up race. Even Match Group have plans to introduce metaverse features into Tinder and OkCupid. Jacqueline asks ‘Is it all just hype?’
Jacqueline became interested in the metaverse through her research in animation and corporations like Warner Brothers. Animation is ‘imbricated in the logics of the virtual space’. Avatars are essential to the metaverse; infinitely customisable with smooth and simplified aesthetics for quicker load time. For me, the avatars seem to be part of the aesthetics of the digital age as written about by Byung-Chul Han in Saving Beauty. Created from the desire for frictionless, the metaverse is a pursuit for the elimination of any resistance. Smoothness is collecting as much data as possible while maintaining a society of positivity. The smooth becomes the signature of the present time. Jacqueline pointed out that much of the focus around diversity is on individual customisation, particularly the user experience in isolation and therefore not as much attention is given to space and interactivity.
Jacqueline shared an incredibly thoughtful position to respond to some of the problems she identified, using queer phenomenology as a tool to enable us to speak about the metaverse in a more conducive way to our desires. Sara Ahmeds’ writing on orientations share how certain orientations and spaces pressure us to follow particular lines, which we are shaped by and then reproduce. Spaces are made available to particular bodies, and the preference for these spaces become codified through repetition. Particular oritentations are privileged over others through repetition. Jacqueline proposed that if we pay attention to animation loops that speculate on the metaverse, we can trace the loops of normative orientation that are formed by the repetition the action.
Jacqueline signalled to the potentiality for queer embodiment in the metaverse made possible when some desires deviate from the normative orientations, forging new desire lines. VR systems may enable users to cross gender and identify boundaries. Yet Jacqueline was also critical (rightfully so) of the way in which Meta’s digital world, for example, suppresses the way we can access knowledge of the body. Digital landlords were mentioned in the q&a section. I came to know digital landlords, like Jacqueline mentioned, through How to with John Wilson. A digital landlord owns virtual property on the internet, and rents out space to others. The metaverse as a space has infinite resources, so it is all ready interesting to see how users decide to occupy the space, or how the metaverse orients its users towards a reproduction of capitalist ownership.
Virtual worlds are a powerful space for self expression. Jacqueline questioned whether the metaverse, with the ability to connect to others through a cultivated identity, could provide a space to envision and test new forms of queer embodiment. I was inspired, from my own experience of finding affirmation of my gender identity in online spaces. However, as Jacqueline emphasised, the embodied capacity for joy and connection must be privileged in order to animate a truly queer desire.
Please come along to the Friday Lunchtime Talks at the Pervasive Media Studio- every Friday 1-2pm. 🙂
We are excited to inform you about the series of Alternative Technologies workshops at the Pervasive Media Studio.
Often we hear grand statements such as ‘technology is the future’, or ‘technology x is the next best thing’. To unravel what this means and to challenge the assumptions made, we start each workshop by asking: What possible alternatives can we imagine and create?
The workshops will explore a number of technologies that are presented as inevitable parts of our future. Each workshop will run for one day on the topics below:
Metaverse (14 March)
Blockchain/cryptocurrency (9 May)
AI & Creativity (20 June)
Megaengineering (20th July)
Each workshop will be made up of four main parts: Welcome/Intro, Theme Exploration, Design Fiction & Messy Systems.
Thinking through why these technologies become popular, we will explore what desires are satisfied, what promises are made and what problems they ‘seem’ to solve. In response, we will think through what approaches can be created for alternative futures. Sharing ideas and thoughts on each theme, we hope that the workshops will develop a community of practice for those interested in digital futures. This can inform speculative work and help build a strong foundation for future ideas.
We are really excited for these workshops- to have though-provoking conversations, challenge the conventions of technology, and reroute desires to imagine more meaningful futures!
This will be a series of day-long workshops, each focused on a particular technology, from the groups below:
Studio residents
Watershed staff
UWE Bristol researchers
University of Bristol researchers
You are welcome to apply for more than one workshop, applicants will have to submit separate applications they would like to join.
These workshops can be a stepping stone for those applying for the Alternative Technologies Seedcorn Funding Award. For more info on this, please email artf-cct@bristol.ac.uk
Drop a line to the Centre for any questions or queries!
