Journalism in Second Life

Our research seeks to understand the emerging journalism practiced in Second Life—a computer-generated alternative reality. Framed by postmodernism, this study uses an ideological analysis to evaluate the three Second Life newspapers: the Alphaville Herald, the Metaverse Messenger and the Second Life Newspaper. We suggest that journalism in Second Life focuses on community building and education, considers the influence of the on-line world to resident members\u27 off-line lives and raises important questions about freedom of expression

Modern ‘live’ football: moving from the panoptican gaze to the performative, virtual and carnivalesque

Drawing on Redhead's discussion of Baudrillard as a theorist of hyperreality, the paper considers the different ways in which the mediatized ‘live’ football spectacle is often modelled on the ‘live’ however eventually usurps the ‘live’ forms position in the cultural economy, thus beginning to replicate the mediatized ‘live’. The blurring of the ‘live’ and ‘real’ through an accelerated mediatization of football allows the formation of an imagined community mobilized by the working class whilst mediated through the sanitization, selling of ‘events’ and the middle classing of football, through the re-encoding of sporting spaces and strategic decision-making about broadcasting. A culture of pub supporting then allows potential for working-class supporters to remove themselves from the panoptican gazing systems of late modern hyperreal football stadia and into carnivalesque performative spaces, which in many cases are hyperreal and simulated themselves

Fashion and desire in an ecologically sustainable world

The popularity of sustainability has encroached on the fashion industry and as such, there are currently an increasing number of fashion designers and brands who profit from the sales of “sustainable fashion.” The fashion industry capitalises upon its ability to create new, desirable trends that equally as expeditiously become undesirable. Is an industry whose sole purpose is to create products which consumers desire for a meagre ration of time (before disposing of and purchasing the next emerging trend) ever capable of being truly sustainable? And more so, what fundamental social structures hold consumers hostage to an industry which hegemonically disempowers them through creating a clever and deceptive guise of ‘pseudo-empowerment’

Prime, Perform, Recover

This thesis examines the formal and conceptual framework of my artistic practice as it culminated in the installation of my thesis exhibition, Prime, Perform, Recover. My exhibition seeks to operate as an analysis and critique of the separation inherent in media presentation and rhetoric surrounding natural disasters. I utilize the aesthetics and vocabulary of disaster capitalism and prepping culture in order to pose direct questions about ecological and social change. I examine the role of images within mass media image production as an all encompassing Now-Time. In this paper I describe frameworks that my practice proposes as potential solutions to these problems, and I position my research in the context of artists and artworks that have influenced me and operate within similar channels as my own

Language-GAME-Players: Articulating the pleasures of ‘violent’ game texts

Young peoples’ voices have been considered irrelevant or unreliable when it comes to discussing the influence and impact of their engagement with screen-mediated depictions of violence. Historically, such viewpoints have been derived from the controlled experimentation of modernist psychology, which constitutes the most sustained and prominent enquiries into the consequences of individual participation in, and viewing of, simulated violence. In espousing an impersonal approach, psychological research has opted not to demonstrate any understanding of the properties of the particular games or the medium its findings have been used to denigrate. Neither does its research possess broader awareness of the social dimensions of play or the productivity inherent in the practices of its surrounding cultures. This paper introduces findings taken from a two-year project that attempted to draw together what have essentially remained separate lines of inquiry – the critical and analytical scrutiny of Game Studies applied to understanding the pleasures of engagement with game violence. The aim of this research was to achieve a more contextual understanding of texts that utilise violence from the perspective of young people that opt to experience them as an entertainment form. In doing so, a range of qualitative methods were employed to encourage game players to present their viewpoints and offer a voice that is all too often absent from the ‘one-way debate’ attached to the representation of violence within games

“Throw[ing] the Longest Shadows”: The Significance of the Bogus Quotation for Arcadia by Jim Crace

Preceding his Arcadia with a non-existing quotation, Jim Crace proves to be no Arcadian innocent: challenging the shrewdness of his readers, the contemporary novelist seems to take pleasure in inviting them to an intellectual game which begins before the novel unfolds. The highly evocative title and the bogus quotation are bound to evoke associations which become the subject of minute examination in the novel. Its result turns out to be as astounding as the uncommon aphoristic trap laid for the readers. This article examines the significance of the bogus quotation as a part of the novel’s message and a key to its interpretation

Consuming gardens: Representations of paradise, nostalgia and postmodernism

This paper unravels the types of relationships people have with their gardens. This is achieved through a review of previous literature on the topic, coupled with a theoretical contextualisation which utilises postmodern concepts, notably that of Jameson's 'nostalgic return' (1989). To illustrate the relevance of these concepts to an understanding of gardening the paper turns to a number of gardening 'texts' and 'spaces' to decipher the ways in which gardens are consumed within contemporary culture. It argues that representations of gardens cohere around two key motifs: the search for paradise and the imagined return to a long-forgotten past