Avatars of the Word

Avatars of the Word PDF

Author: James Joseph O'Donnell

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780674055452

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In Avatars of the Word, O'Donnell reinterprets today's communication revolution through a series of refracted comparisons with earlier revolutionary periods: from the papyrus scroll to the codex and from copied manuscript to print.

Halos and Avatars

Halos and Avatars PDF

Author: Craig Detweiler

Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press

Published: 2010-01-25

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1611640040

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Craig Detweiler's collection of up-to-the-minute essays on video games' theological themes (and yes, they do exist!) is an engaging and provocative book for gamers, parents, pastors, media scholars, and theologians--virtually anyone who has dared to consider the ramifications of modern society's obsession with video games and online media. Together, these essays take on an exploding genre in popular culture and interpret it through a refreshing and enlightening philosophical lens.

Embodied Avatars

Embodied Avatars PDF

Author: Uri McMillan

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-11-04

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1479802115

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"Tracing a dynamic genealogy of performance from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, McMillian contends that black women artists practiced a purposeful self-objectification, transforming themselves into art objects. In doing so, these artists raised new ways to ponder the intersections of art, performance, and black female embodiment."--Back cover.

Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance

Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance PDF

Author: Liam Jarvis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-11-18

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1350159328

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In the context of the postdigital age, where technology is increasingly part of our social and political world, Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance traces how identity can be created, developed, hijacked, manipulated, sabotaged and explored through performance in postdigital cultures. Considering how technology is reshaping performance, this timely collection reveals how we engage in performance practices through expanded notions of intermediality, knotted networks and layering. This book examines the artist as activist and producer of avatars, and how digital doubles, artificial intelligence and semi-automated politics are problematizing and expanding our discussions of identity. Using a range of examples in theatre, film and internet-based performance practices, chapters examine the uncertain boundaries of networked 'informational selves' in mediatized cultures, the impacts of machine algorithms, apps and the consequences of digital legacies. Case studies include James Cameron's Avatar, Blast Theory's Karen, Ontroerend Goed's A Game of You, Randy Rainbow's online videos, Sisters Grimm's Calpurnia Descending, Dead Centre's Lippy and Chekhov's First Play and Jo Scott's practice-as-research in 'place-mixing'. This is an incisive study for scholars, students and practitioners interested in the wider conversations around identity-formation in postdigital cultures.

Hello Avatar

Hello Avatar PDF

Author: B. Coleman

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-12-05

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 0262549891

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An examination of our many modes of online identity and how we live on the continuum between the virtual and the real. Hello Avatar! Or, {llSay(0, "Hello, Avatar!"); is a tiny piece of user-friendly code that allows us to program our virtual selves. In Hello Avatar, B. Coleman examines a crucial aspect of our cultural shift from analog to digital: the continuum between online and off-, what she calls the “x-reality” that crosses between the virtual and the real. She looks at the emergence of a world that is neither virtual nor real but encompasses a multiplicity of network combinations. And she argues that it is the role of the avatar to help us express our new agency—our new power to customize our networked life. By avatar, Coleman means not just the animated figures that populate our screens but the gestalt of images, text, and multimedia that make up our online identities—in virtual worlds like Second Life and in the form of email, video chat, and other digital artifacts. Exploring such network activities as embodiment, extreme (virtual) violence, and the work in virtual reality labs, and offering sidebar interviews with designers and practitioners, she argues that what is new is real-time collaboration and copresence, the way we make connections using networked media and the cultures we have created around this. The star of this drama of expanded horizons is the networked subject—all of us who represent aspects of ourselves and our work across the mediascape.

Gene Avatars

Gene Avatars PDF

Author: Pierre-Henri Gouyon

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2002-05-31

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0306466163

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Evolutionary genetics - the subject of this book - sends the individual crashing. Considered until recently to be the target of selection and the focus of evolution, the individual has been usurped by the gene. The individual is nothing but the gene's avatar."--BOOK JACKET.

The Science of Avatar

The Science of Avatar PDF

Author: Stephen Baxter

Publisher: Orbit

Published: 2012-05-29

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0316224014

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Audiences around the world have been enchanted by James Cameron's visionary Avatar, with its glimpse of the Na'vi on the marvelous world of Pandora. But the movie is not entirely a fantasy; there is a scientific rationale for much of what we saw on the screen, from the possibility of travel to other worlds, to the life forms seen on screen and the ecological and cybernetic concepts that underpin the 'neural networks' in which the Na'vi and their sacred trees are joined, as well as to the mind-linking to the avatars themselves. From popular science journalist and acclaimed science fiction author Stephen Baxter, The Science of Avatar is a guide to the rigorous fact behind the fiction. It will enhance the readers' enjoyment of the movie experience by drawing them further into its imagined world.

Virtual Body Language : the History and Future of Avatars : how Nonverbal Expression is Evolving on the Internet

Virtual Body Language : the History and Future of Avatars : how Nonverbal Expression is Evolving on the Internet PDF

Author: Jeffrey Ventrella

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1257763555

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Why does the tail wag the brain? What is virtual autism? Why can't our avatars walk hand-in-hand? Will a nonverbal Babel fish save the world? Jeffrey Ventrella, a seasoned virtual worlds programmer and visual language expert, reviews the history of avatars, smileys, and other expressive forms, and considers a future of spectacular creativity. This book combines thoughtful scholarship with amusing anecdotes from the trenches of Silicon Valley. Virtual Body Language presents a thorough analysis of the neurological, linguistic, aesthetic, and technical aspects of how nonverbal communication can be distributed over the internet. Based on nearly a decade of avatar development, Ventrella has the practical foundation on which to justify even the most outrageous claims, regarding what "avatar" might mean in the future.