Produsage
I have become quite fascinated by this topic: http://produsage.org/
Axel Bruns provides some very tangible definitions for quite a few things which have been floating around in my head and which I couldn’t quite pin-point. Also there is another writer, Michel Bauwens, of whom I found out about through the produsage website, and who also seems to be excellent. Haven’t read his text yet, but looks very promising at first glance.
I was thinking of writing a paper for the VW2012 conference which will happen in Paris this summer. Couldn’t find a topic to save my life, so gave up on it in the end. Until I came across ‘produsage’ which I promptly applied to alpha.tribe. Not what I do with the place that is, but what people who buy the stuff do with it. Which is produsage par excellence it seems to me… Took me a good few days to put this together, but here it is:
http://www.alphaauer.com/papers/ayiter_Acquisitions-for-Creativity-Produsage-in-the-Metaverse.pdf
In it I use the output of quite a few avatars, and also I have been bugging people in the alpha.tribe group to answer questions related to this. And some of them want to see what I wrote, which is basically why I have uploaded it and linked it to here.
Bidding farewell to an old sweetheart…
Although I try not to post day to day stuff on this blog, I still want to link a post I just made on the old Alpha blog (which hardly gets any visits these days for the obvious reason that there is hardly ever anything new to read) to here, in the hope that it may get a few readings, since it is about something which has affected me quite strongly in recent days:
http://alphaauer.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/bidding-farewell-to-an-old-sweetheart/
Uncanny Valley graph
I am continuing to organize (and also re-write) the projects which are going to become a part of the practice portfolio of the PhD. The Uncanny Valley/Avatar was the first big self-observational thing which I did in SL, almost 4 years ago. For this I applied Masahiro Mori’s robotics theory from 1970 to avatar appearance. So, the graph above is an adaptation of Mori’s original graph. At the bottom are his examples and at the top are the corresponding ones which I came up with.
alpha.tribe tales
http://issuu.com/elifayiter/docs/alphatribe-tales
When I submit my dissertation I will also have to show creative output since mine is a practice based PhD. (And yes – unfortunately I blew the December 31 deadline, so the new one is now March 30…).
For the default documentation I will be handing in straightforward DVDs with images/videos inside folders so that the examiners can find the stuff easily. However I also want to make some other stuff – that I will actually enjoy putting together. One idea that I have is to make real, that is laser printed and bound, books out of material that goes together. I am thinking that I will make 3 of them and here is the first one:
Obviously alpha.tribe is a very large portion of the final chapter in which I talk about the actual stuff that I made for the practice part of the thesis. The first part of what I say about alpha.tribe concerns the actual “business” itself, how it all came about, the 5 alternative selves as independent fashion designers and so forth. And then a second part however are what (for lack of a better word) I am calling the alpha.tribe tales, which I concocted out of the outfits which were made for alpha.tribe. So, this book holds 4 of these tales – ‘the abject’, ‘the encounter’, ‘text’, and ‘uranometria’.
Aside from the fact that I like making them anyway, in this case I made the flipbook on issuu also to see how the whole thing works when it is actually put into a book format. This is the reason why there are page numbers on this, normally I would not be putting them into something like a virtual flipbook. And issuu is really great for testing purposes, I am sure editorial designers must be using it to no end to proof their publications. Used to be such a hassle before all this, basically the only way to do it back then was to construct a whole dummy book. Which was expensive and time consuming, of course.