Virtually Embodying the Field: Silent Online Buddhist Meditation, Immersion, and the Cardean Ethnographic Method

This article sketches the Cardean Ethnographic research method that emerged from two years of study inSecond Life’s Zen Buddhist cloud communities. Second Life is a 3D graphic virtual world housed in cyberspace that can be accessed via the Internet from any networked computer on the globe.Cloud communitiesare groups that are temporary, flexible, elastic and inexpensive in the social capital required to join or to leave. In our research, we found ourselves facing a two-sided methodological problem. We had to theorize the virtual and its relation to the actual, while simultaneously creating practices for an effective ethnographic method. Our solution,named after the Roman Goddess of the hinge, Cardea,was a method that uses the model of a hinge to theorize the virtual as desubtantialized and the worlds opened up by cyberspace as nondualistic. This understanding of the virtual worldscalled for a classic ethnographic methodbased on participant observation and thick description

Managing Cosplay Performance: The Forms and Expectations of Convention Roleplay

Costume play (i.e. cosplay) is a performance of fandom rife with rituals and communication practices. Cosplay roleplaying performances are cultural practices that reveal how cosplayers interact with one another and among non-cosplaying members of their fandoms. This study examines the expectations that cosplayers hold for roleplay, the forms of roleplay, and the ways in which roleplay can become an instigator of harassment. Through the lens of Face-Negotiation Theory, the author discusses how roleplay functions to maintain or threaten the public images of cosplayers and their audiences, and what strategies cosplayers implement to avoid the loss of face

Utopian Visions in Radical Communities: Burning Man

This research paper is a collection of utopian visions gathered from the Radical Community of Burning Man. The goal of this research is to collect a sample of utopian visions from this community, organize them, and share them in a way that can be effectively used in a professional and/or activist environment. Research was done in the fall of 2013 at the Burning Man Festival, in 2014 at a Regional Burning Man Event: Lakes of Fire, and with the Burner Community around these times. The primary research question is: What are utopian visions of the \u27Burning Man\u27 radical community? The field question exclusively used to collect all participant responses was: What is something you\u27d like to see happening in the future in an Ideal or Utopian Future? Data was collected from over 300 participant responses. The reason for this research is to provide a view into the radical visions of utopia, using Burning Man as a specific case study. This research provides a basis for both further similar research projects and a foundation for efforts to create a more ideal or utopian society thorough social activism and community design projects. Limitations are presented, and conceptual frameworks are provided to assist in analysis of the collected data. The cherished component of this research project is the responses from the members of the Burning Man Community, and I am grateful for their time, for their love, and for sharing their visions of utopia

Peacock Cabinet. Mary Magdalene From Feathers To Fur To Flesh: Painting a woodparent cabinet red

Description: This magazine is a written and graphic account of attempting to level with the scope and scale of the kind intuition that is responsible for producing the desire to create something. The kind of desire that you are not able to contain in anything you already are aware of. The kind of idea you cannot quite define, which are kept alive by a particular gut feeling[1]. A feeling that are both joyous and frightening, outlining the contour of a body on the horizon of thought. A contour you are curious to experience with full sensorial perception. Bodies we normally meet in the category of artefacts – wordless but sensible. Naturally, this perception of a “body” cannot be represented, when there is such a desire, by any other fashion than how the faculty that perceives it demands. Obviously, the project then must begin with an abandonment of documenting the process of making, as an effort of parallelism and on reasons of opposing the believed value of “transparency”, as forms of heresy. Rather, it embraces the concept of documenting the parts of the pattern that is possible to capture in a document – publishing it on the note of querying its validity. The various aspects of the work must be allowed to be faithful to their own laws, which in turn, creates a liminal state for the artistic researcher, like a place of rest, just outside the field polarity [artistic and research]. Thus, this document does not represent the made cabinet, but it mirrors a perception of a pattern, as does the cabinet. The liminal state between making and writing is not stable, because of the current asymmetric relationship between the two – the ontogeny of the pattern was initiated with the conception of a piece of furniture; the precision of language dwarfs our collective conscious understanding of craft. It is published, not as a scholarly embellishment of what is made, but, alongside the actual cabinet, as a demonstration of the fecundity of the bivalent deployment of artistic and research. Between the two, the designer is given two roles. 1) The attempt of transposing the quite nerdy research from a presentation of whim and caprice to a demonstration of live connections that is possible to connect with and trying its’ best to arbiter the connections in a comprehensible and coherent line of thinking. Artistic research is the rig that allows this possibility of sustained concentration, but it demands quite allot from the reader, as it has from BJB. 2) The second role given to the designer is found between Ingmar Bergman’s spear of intuition[2] and Michael Schwab’s notion of artistic research as the assembly of the rear-guard as opposed to the avant-garde. I propose rather not to send anyone anywhere, but to go the distance yourself. The designer’s intuition is not a wild stab in the dark but, if it was a spear, thrown with a rope and pully already attached to the back end. The mark manifests itself simultaneously with the perception of the pattern, connecting here and there, already with a sense of a route. The route is obviously not as you believe, and the mark may very well be very different to what you thought you aimed at, and finally there, all kinds of things are different. I don’t obey my intuition but are curious to find out what it knows. Matching resistance to flow. As the editor marks in her notes, friction is thick in this magazine. --------------------------------------------------------------------- [1]An inadequate word now that the chemical signals to the brain from the gut is given credence over will. A better description could be something like a sudden recognition of a pattern, between pervious unrelated issues. [2]“I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find that spear. That is intellect”publishedVersio

Re-Enchanting the Social: Identity Transformation, Embodiment, and Prefigurative Religious Practices in New Spirituality Culture

This study explores contemporary and alternative forms of religion active in the Pittsburgh area. Otherwise known as New Age and neopagan, new spiritualities are a domain of religiosity marked by individualism, multiculturalism, and idiosyncratic experimentation with identity that is both subjectively oriented, yet communalistic. Under investigation are the rituals and material culture of study participants, which includes examining the physical manifestations of what are often internal, invisible, and subjective processes. Chapter themes include ritual and structure, commodification and healing, psychonautics and re-enchantment, all of which are defined and discussed via participant comments. Understanding processes of meaning-making, and how beliefs work within these subcultures, is enabled in part through an examination of spirituality texts and discourses. Included therefore is an analysis of such texts, in which the story of modern seekership is interpreted and contextualized, but additionally through the medium of such popular collective myths as Alice in Wonderland and The Matrix. Some questions include, what are the social structures of new spiritualities? What kinds of communities exist to house them? How do norms operate, and what sorts of power dynamics govern such cultural spaces? What are the common goals of individuals who follow new spiritualities? What kinds of embodied experiences define them? How are relationships conducted? What is the role of gender? How is sexuality conceived of? And how does this form of religiosity reproduce itself? Answering these questions partly involves contrasting new spiritualities with traditional religions and normative society. New spirituality is a way of life, and a world view. It is an approach to living that is guided by particular values, beliefs, and practices, all of which shape members’ orientation to among other things healthcare, diet, technology, and the environment

Role-Playing Reality: Queer Theory, New Materialisms, and Digital Role-Play

This thesis works to reconfigure who or what the situated agencies in digital role-play are to realise the more-than-human dimensions and embodiments of play. In doing so, it finds that all the collaborators in digital role-play [players, avatars, interfaces, networks, software, media content, art, performances, gestics, imaginings, alongside other games] disclose the emergent and latent relations and sensations that characterise play. In recognising all these elements as vital and active companions in role-play, this work addresses the question of what the realities of digital role-play are: where realities signify the actualities of what happens when human and nonhuman bodies entangle during play as well as the substances of reality – performance and affect, matter and meaning, space and time – all of which determine role-play. World of Warcraft (Blizzard 2004-) is taken as the primary example in this thesis, though the affordances of its role-players are irradiated alongside other games, art, literature, performances, and materials that likewise ‘play’ with fiction. Alongside these modalities, the Argent Archives, a massive collection of content posted by role-players who play World of Warcraft, evidences the lifeworlds of digital role-play. Since digital role-play is rarely studied, and the Argent Archives never so, this thesis explores foundational questions regarding the realities of play: what they comprise and how players actively create emergent gameworlds with their arts and acts. This thesis employs a methodology of promiscuity, that is, promiscuity as method in order to reckon with the entanglements of play. Inspired by the works of queer theorists and new materialists, which centre bodies, affects, and entanglements, a correspondingly promiscuous methodology follows the labyrinthine folds of encounter that define play while emphasising its intimate, sensual, troubling, and perverse aspects

A framework for the analysis of identity and expression of self within Second Life

This research uses Second Life as a research environment to examine the ways in which expression of self and identity are developed via avatars within social virtual worlds. It documents and categorises the different purposes of avatars, the relationships that operators develop with them and the various factors which influence this development.The historical and theoretical context of the research charts the development of theories of identity from the pre-modern through modern and post-modernist schools, and contemporary authors and researchers such as Tom Boellstorff and Nick Yee whose extensive work within Second Life relate directly to the research topic.The methodology chapter justifies the use of Second Life as a platform to conduct the research which includes interviews with individuals already operating avatars within Second Life, operators new to this virtual environment, and artistic practitioners who have used Second Life to examine issues of identity. In addition the research uses ethnographic and phenomenological research methods based in the author’s own artistic practice to gain additional supporting data.Developing upon the historical and theoretical context, the Lacanian concepts of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real are used to develop an original Table of Modalities typifying avatars by their differing purposes, characteristics and operator/avatar relationships, and promoting the use of a common framework of language by researchers discussing these topics. This table is used to analyse the data collected and facilitate an examination of the ways in which individuals manifest different relationships with, and behaviours via, avatars and the resultant changes in the expression of identity of both avatar and operator

Ambient learning and self authorship : human minds, cultural tools, immersive worlds

This thesis begins with an examination of the Marinetta Ombro project, a lengthy exercise in building a virtual culture, carried out by staff and students at Arcada, a university of applied science. Arcada's experience in Second Life revealed much about the ways people think, feel and act inside synthetic worlds, and about the ways in which they live their lives as narrative. The second part of the thesis examines the implications of these findings with reference to the work of artists and writers, philosophers, theologians and neuro-scientists. It looks at how we relate to the world, where our ideas come from, what "it is like to be" us; and concludes that, in contrast to our usual view of ourselves, "we are stories all the way down". In the final part of the thesis the author looks at how we can apply this knowledge socially and politically, in a world of ambient learning; and what tools we can build to assist us in authoring our (social) selves