[Image: Merry-go-Round by Lily & Honglei] Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds :: Call for Papers — Deadline: August 30, 2010.

Submissions are invited for an edited book with the working title Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds. Machinima - referring to “filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies” as well as works which use this animation technique, including videos recorded in computer games or virtual worlds - is challenging the notion of the moving image in numerous media contexts, such as video games, animation, digital cinema and virtual worlds.

Machinima’s increasingly dynamic use and construction of images from virtual worlds - appropriated, imported, worked over, re-negotiated, re-configured, re-composed - not only confronts the conception and ontology of the recorded moving image, but also blurs the boundaries between contemporary media forms, definitions and aesthetics, converging filmmaking, animation, virtual world and game development.

Even as it poses these theoretical challenges, machinima is expanding as a practice via internet networks and fan-based communities as well as in pedagogical and marketing contexts. In these ways, machinima is also transformative, presenting alternative ways and modes of teaching and commercial promotion, in-game events and, perhaps most significantly, networking cultures and community-building within game, virtual and filmmaking worlds, among others.

Divided into these two sections - machinima (i) in theoretical analysis; and (ii) as practice - this first collection of essays seeks to explore how we can understand machinima in terms of the theoretical challenges it poses as well as its manifestations as a practice. We are primarily concerned with offering critical discussions of its history, theory, aesthetics, media form and social implications, as well as insights into its development and the promise of what it can become. How does machinima fit in the spectrum of media forms? What are the ontological differences between images from machinima and photochemical/ digital filmmaking? How does machinima co-opt the affordances of the game engine to provide narrative? How may machinima, developed from the products of game and virtual world marketing, be used as an artistic tool? How is machinima self-reflexive, if at all, of the virtual environments from which they arise? What are the implications of re-deploying these media formats into alternative media forms? How does the open-source economy that currently defines much of global machinima relate it to broader cultural production generally?

In particular, we are looking for essays that address (but not limited to) the following ideas:

• History: context; definitions; culture; relationships to gaming and play; development of technology; hardware and games; archiving of play;
• Theory: image; ontology; time; space; narrative; realism; spectatorship; subjectivity; virtual camera; materiality;
• Aesthetics: poetics; play; visuality; detournement; remix; digital mashup; appropriation; recombinative narratives; audio and visual theory; spatiality; narrative architecture;
• Contemporary media contexts: comparative media; machinima vis-a-vis video games, (digital) cinema, animation, virtual worlds; the visual economy of machinima versus film;
• Communities: Machinima as community-based practice and performance; user created content; online publishing; fan (fiction) communities; open source; cultural reflection;
• Pedagogy: digital literacy; teaching models and practices; student-centered learning; critical making; collaborative authorship; rhetorics; problem based learning;
• Marketing: crowd sourcing; viral marketing; peer to peer sharing; commercials, trailer promotions; grass roots versus astro turf; serials and sequels.

Please submit a 400 word abstract and a short bio via e-mail to understandingmachinima [at] gmail.com (NOT the e-mail address of the sender above) by 30 August 2010. We expect that final essays should not exceed 7,000 words and be due on 30 December 2010.

Jenna P-S. Ng
James Barrett
HUMlab, Umea University
Sweden

Upgrade! Boston: Joseph DeLappe + Pete Froslie :: March 11, 2010; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute for Technology N51-390, 265 Massachusetts Avenue, 3rd Floor, Cambridge, MA (Entrance to the right of the MIT Museum).

Joseph DeLappe is an Associate Professor of the Department of Art at the University of Nevada where he directs the Digital Media program. Working with electronic and new media since 1983, his work in online gaming performance and electromechanical installation have been shown throughout the United States and abroad - including exhibitions and performances in Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Peru, China and the Netherlands. He was a 2008 Commissioned Resident Artist at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York City. In his 2006 dead-in-iraq project, he began typing, consecutively, all of the names of America’s military casualties from the war in Iraq into the “America’s Army” first person shooter online recruiting game. More here.

Pete Froslie received his MFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art in 2008. He moved to Boston in 2005 from Reno, Nevada, where he earned his BFA in Digital Media. He returns to Reno periodically to teach courses at the University of Nevada, Reno, and to remain an active part of the community. In 2008 he was recognized as one of the top five graduating visual artists by the Boston Globe. His work has been discussed and highlighted online and in print, including MAKE, Gizmodo, the Boston Globe, RN&R, and the Reno Gazette. Froslie explores diverse tangents ranging from alternative historical fiction and documentary, to electro-mechanical sculpture and prostheses. More here.

Upgrade! Boston is curated by Jo-Anne Green for Turbulence.org. Founded in Januray 2005, is one of 32 nodes currently active in Upgrade! International, an emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. If you would like to present your work or get involved, please email jo at turbulence dot org.