….Krista, and I’m an installation artist/gamer from the midwest. Many a snowy night has been spent in what I (affectionately) call “the land of corn,” questing and raiding in World of Warcraft. Only recently has my gaming life intersected with my art life, due largely in part to the inspiring work by everyone here at iRez, as well as Joseph DeLappe, Feminist Frequency, Anna Anthrope, Wendy Vanity, and my fabulous art students from Art 366: Cyberfeminism and Advanced New Media at Saint Mary’s College. I’ve spent a majority of my artistic life as an installation artist, so performative strategies are totally new to me. What I’ve realized in some of my feminist-WoW-culture-jamming-experiments is….I’m shy?!
WTF y’all?
Case in point, I read an article over at The Mary Sue last April about women and armor in WoW by Becky Chambers (“For Anyone Still Wondering, Yes, Women Can Wear Full Armor Too.”). In it, Chambers points out that despite the fact that the WoW Wiki entry for “Female Armor” is designated as silly, the argument against the design of heavy armor for women in WoW often utilizes the entry’s “silly” content…but in a serious light:
“Female armor tends to cover less than does male armor. Though there are many people who see this as mere fanservice, there are real, practical reasons behind it. First, females are statistically less muscular than males, and depend more on agility and cunning than raw strength in combat, thus lightweight armor makes more sense.”
Ohhhhh…this made me so mad! I saw this as an opportunity for a culture jam, and decided to change WoW wiki entry for Female Armor. You may recognize the text as appropriated from Ashley Judd’s response to criticism over her “puffy face” in The Daily Beast.
From this:
…to this:
I posted the new content, my heart beating in excitement….only to take it down after 10 minutes!! Other WoW feministing projects have fared a little better, but not really without running away or teleporting from the scene of the performance or event as quickly as I can. Avatars don’t function as something to hide behind (which is opposite of popular thinking on avatars, right?)…at least for me.
So…help a sister out! Do you ever feel shy online…be it a MMOG -or- other social, virtual area/arena? Is shyness something a lot of performance-based artists grapple with? Culture jamming and critique can come with pretty hefty consequences and backlash . How do you deal with this in your performances, or other virtual exchanges?
Kryzzik practicing the WoW slash command add on “/dunn”…a feminist quote generator
Krista!!! WELCOME TO iREZ!!
Yay!! Thanks so much for joining us!
OMG, I love your WoW Armor / Ashley Judd Hack!!!
So… it came down after 10 minutes because another user deleted / reverted it? Or you took it down yourself?
I’m trying to quote Marina Abramovic as little as possible these days as her ubiquity is almost becoming cliche, but the queen of “edgy performance” has said that she doesn’t do these works because she “enjoys” them, but because she doesn’t want to do them, that she’s constantly trying to push at her own limits.
In the documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry they ask how he has the courage to do these things in the face of such an oppressive regime, and he says no, no, I have no courage, I do these things because I’m afraid.
You mentioned the Anita Sarkeesian Kickstarter “incident” which was pretty crazy. The attacks / hate against her were pretty bad, yet in the end it seemed like her Kickstarter campaign wound up with a lot more funding as a “backlash to the backlash”.
In one sense that’s a bittersweet reward… but it’s also an unfortunately polarized space. On the Internet you’re never more than a few clicks away, no matter what you express, from someone who thinks you’re a total idiot.
I’m sure that’s just a mirror of RL, but I think IRL peeps less often take the trouble to show up at things they hate. But obviously there are RL trolls just like the Online trolls who attacked Sarkeesian.
As for your “virtual shyness”… hmm… stereotypes are simplistic of course… yet I do think that Felicia Day aside, charismatic actor types are probably less likely to be behind a keyboard for hours… hmm… I wonder if that’s still true today… not sure…
Anyway, it seems like there are a lot of introverted / introspective peeps around… and there’s the various flavors of Avatar as Augmentation vs Immersion, but still, it represents some Ego “You”. I’ve played with avatar bodies, some I feel more comfortable and natural in, some feel like a more frictious fit…then others like the robot body I tried yesterday, was ok, but less immersive… I didn’t mind it, but I didn’t “feel it” as much as my “normal” body.
In terms of Anonym, Pseudonym, Orthonym, I suppose you shouldn’t be shy when posting anonymously, since that “isn’t” you… and when you use your orthonym maybe it’s all on the line. A pseudonym like your avatar, might be less threatening than your “wallet name,” but it’s still an identity that you have built up over minutes or years and have both credibility and ego in.
It’s funny, we’ve been talking a lot about this “Virtual Salon” format, so a week or so ago I was looking for pix of Gertrude Stein’s old Paris apartment… I found a blog from 2008 from a woman in the publishing industry in Texas who’d visited the apartment. Then in her Dec 2008 post she says she’s taking a few weeks off because the blog has become both stressful and boring, and her resolution is to come back and really get it together and create far more compelling content.
The next, and final ever, blog post is early January and she says she hates her blog, she paradoxically feels like she’s totally constrained and can’t be herself there, and we should all email her because she’d love to keep the conversation going, but she just can’t blog anymore.
It was funny to have a photo search turn into a soul search, but in terms of the Shydentity issues, how funny, yet understandable, that this most personal and expressive of mediums had become such a boring, voiceless, constrained, tedious exercise for her.
Ultimately, I feel like your clarity about your own ideas, your confidence about your cultural perspectives, and yes, your shyness / fear… will coalesce into some pretty great VR hacks to come…
Thanks so much for being here Krista!
Oh… and Yes, your dead body IS adorable!
THANK YOU Vanessa for your amazing feedback! Do you think my links caused the spam flagging? I hope I’m not contributing to your spam-sifting….omg.
Hi Krista, no no, I don’t think it was you at all. I was having trouble getting a comment to post and may have submitted it 2 or more times and wound up in some kind of wordpress / akismet vapor lock and somehow got the page flagged.
And… IT’S NOW FIXED, YAY! So this post seems to work normally again!
Don’t worry I’m sure it won’t happen on your next piece. And links ‘n stuff are the whole point, so don’t worry about that at all.
We’ve got a couple of WoW players here, Ironyca and Eva, and a number of SL peeps also. I know they’re all excited about your work.
WELCOME!!!! (again!