Planking as Performance Art

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Bonnie

The following is a post I wrote recently for my “Understanding New Media” class blog in response to Shannon Jackson’s book Social Works. I’m personally tickled by, and not entirely unserious about, planking as body-based performance art:

A group of eleven people roam the highways and dumpsters of Chicago, “placing their bodies in different arrangements to find alternate modes of encounter” with the city around them. Shannon Jackson opens her chapter on “Performance, Aesthetics, and Support” with this and other descriptions of “social practices,” performance art that defies both the theater and the gallery while turning its gaze on societal infrastructures.

In the case of the eleven bodies dotting the unlikely corners of Chicago, this infrastructure is the urban environments through the which we move every day. As Jackson narrates the piece (notice how the phrase “placing their bodies” renders these artists body agents and objects), it not only provides new viewpoints for “the differently arranged,” it also makes of those bodies awkward, ill-fit, and therefore strikingly sculptural figures silhouetted against the now queered cityscape.

What about those performing this kind of post-dramatic theater, these post-optical visuals without artistic intentions — at least, not the kinds that Jackson has in mind? This is the question I would like to pose in response to Social Works: where do cultures of performance and visual production like “planking,” a “lowbrow” internet meme, fit into Jackson’s constellation of artistic forms and their meanings?

Planking, a practice in which participants lie flat and stiff in unusual public places (more photos here), strikingly mirrors Jackson’s language of “placed bodies.” Indeed, planking appeals to both practitioners and spectators alike because it carries the charge of “arranging” the self “differently” — of breaking social customs and finding “alternate modes of encounter.” The escalator, a marker of infrastructure, becomes strange and incomprehensible when a body lays rigid, facedown, and unperturbed on its moving steps.

Like the artists Jackson considers in Social Works, plankers walk the line between performance and production; the act of planking is, in true meme fashion, not complete until a photo is published the internet. The importance of visual record is in the image we see here. All the men’s shirts match. The angle and location have been carefully selected. The plankers have done this not just for the experience of encountering the normally abnormally, but for the sake of what could be a Santiago Sierra piece — the photograph. These too are images that use the awkwardness of bodies to make us ourselves feel uncomfortable with the normal… whether or not they intend to do so.
Posted in Academia, Art, Internet culture, New Media | Leave a comment

“Reading Video Games like Literature”

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Bonnie

I’m headed back to Sweden in just a few days to deliver the opening keynote at the Gotland Game Conference, “Reading Video Games like Literature.” Here’s the gist:

Whole books have been written about Hamlet’s famous six words, “To be or not to be,” yet not one page has been published on the implications of Mario’s even more economic proclamation, “It’s-a me, Mario!” That literature is an art form worthy of analysis is a fact we take for granted; we teach novels in school, we memorize poetry, we sit in book clubs and try to figure out what it all means. But what would happen if we turned that lens of “close reading” onto video games

Needless to say, I’m super excited to be preaching the combination of close reading and gaming. Somewhere between Mimesis and Plants vs. Zombies I’m hoping to pull off an entire academic revolution.

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“Sex as Game: Playing with the Erotic Body in Virtual Worlds”

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Bonnie

I published my first academic essay! It’s like being a nascent, nineteen-year-old freelance journalist all over again.

“Sex as Game: Playing with the Erotic Body in Virtual Worlds” came out in Rhizomes 21: Hives and Tribes this past week. Rhizomes is an awesome experimental journal that emphasizes “migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions.” Unsurprisingly, my essay is about sex in video games — specifically, how we can read sex in Second Life as itself a game, thereby gaining broader insight into the sexiness of the ludic. It’s actually a piece I wrote my senior year at Bard and have just now gotten around to revising, so I’m particularly proud. An excerpt:

“The nametag floating over Larry Francesco’s head reads “Made in Italy.” His stringy brown hair hangs across the shoulders of his leather suit. Around his neck he wears a small, black bowtie. Here in the Dream Girls night club, where he stands on the outskirts of a crowd of half-naked, dancing avatars, Larry looks strangely indecent in his pants and coat: too fully clothed. He is searching, however, for the same thing as any club-goer, “virtual” or “real”: sex. His hopes of finding a like-minded beauty to transport to a remote, romantic corner of this 3D online world have inspired him, tonight, to hit the town. In fact, that same desire – for the casual connection of interactive erotic encounters – is what inspired him to sign up for Second Life in the first place…

Though the preeminence of Second Life has recently been eclipsed by the rise of social networks, accounts from those who have ‘lived’ in Linden Lab’s micro-universe remain rich resources for thinking about larger issue of online life: sex, games, bodies, play. Experiences like Larry’s, considered in depth below, raise questions about erotic encounters that go beyond the physical. In what ways does arousal blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual – itself always a false dichotomy, as Tom Boellstorff points out in his ethnography Coming of Age in Second Life (Boellstorff, 19, 27)? Does sex between avatars represent a real, if playful, human connection? Or is it, to paraphrase those popular objections Boellstorff refutes, ‘just a game’?”

Read the rest!

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“100 Works of Impossible Art”

Posted on January 2, 2011 by Bonnie

At the Louvre last January, I saw a temporary exhibit on the art of the list, curated by Umberto Eco. The exhibit itself was underwhelming, but one piece — a large list written on one of the gallery walls — struck me as interesting raw material for possible spin-off projects. The list, “100 oeuvres d’art impossibles” (i.e. “100 Works of Impossible Art”) by Dora Garcia, runs through ideas that could never be realized. #50. Change the name of a large city. #51. Change the names of all the inhabitants. The effect is one possible work of art, a list that is also a poem.

When first standing in the gallery, I found myself interested in what it would mean to present this list, complete with its original title, cut down to only a fifth or so of the entries, still with their original numbers — bringing into question issues of lists as inexhaustible expeditions that strive for but can never reach completion. Here’s a sample of the fractured poem I ended up with (translations throughout are mine):

1. Live someone else’s life.
12. Live multiples lives.
16. Relive your childhood.
24. Invert the sexes.
31. Finish someone’s incomplete work.

Later, when only a few of the 20 or so “works” I’d copied down still stuck with me, I became interested in the fragmentary nature of lists, and how these small, staccato commands/suggestions could be further broken down to highlight this. Specifically, I was thinking about pacing, and decided to enforce a pace for the viewer/reader by placing small chunks of those few “works” on index cards, which could be flipped through as in a slideshow Quickly thrown together, they actually gave me a lot of pleasure to read through.

In going back through my sketchbook over the last few weeks, I found the cards again. How could I preserve them without just taping them down to a page, where they’d all be read at once? Instead I photographed them and put them together in a Flickr set. The pace of clicking through such a set, it turns out, is quite similar to that of flipping through a pile of index cards. Try it out.

Ultimately, I’m quite happy with the project as a mini experiment in list-making and medium. For those fellow purists and French readers, as well as those with a soft spot for found poetry, I leave you with Garcia’s original lines for the translations on the cards:

100 oeuvres d’art impossible
Ne plus bouger
Tout rappeler
Tout oublier
Changez le sens des mots
Arrêter de dormir
Dormer sans arrêt
Vivre la vie de quelqu’un d’autre.

Posted in Art, I made a thing!, Poetry | 3 Comments

Sleep, you tease, I will figure you out

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Bonnie

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been half-heartedly monitoring my sleep cycle using, you know, Sleep Cycle. In theory it’s useful for waking you up when you’re already most awake, circumventing that WTF-how-is-it-morning feeling. Normal charts come out looking like this:

In my case, I’m looking for magical insights into sleeping better; I have a hard time falling asleep, wake up easily, and am pretty much permanently tired. For example, I am very jealous of this person’s chart:

The trouble with such magical insights, aside from the magic, is the fact that I never sleep alone. Sleep Cycle tracks your awake-ness based on the motion or stillness of your bed. Since it can’t differentiate one person’s movements from another’s, my charts are doomed to come out with two graphs overlaid, not to mention the possibility of interactions between the two (i.e. one person waking the other up when they move). Thus my charts look like this:

On nights when I’m not at home, my husband has been Sleep Cycle-ing too. (I’m also jealous of his clear results. I blame my general sleep chart jealousy on general sleep jealousy, which I blame on sleepiness.) By contrast, his charts normally look like this:

This morning I woke up, peered at last night’s palimpsest of a chart, and decided it was time to pull out the graph paper and crayons. My theory: perhaps, from looking at Scott’s normal patterns, I could tease apart our shared graph into our two separate cycles. From his charts, I learned that he normally experiences cycles throughout the night that are somewhat irregular but generally shallow (meaning he rarely reaches the “awake” level). I applied this to three samples. Scott is red. I’m blue. The result:

As with any data plotting involving crayons, this is not an exact science. The two-mountain-ranges approach doesn’t tell me, for instance, the moments that lie behind the blue range:

Then there are moments when my differentiation of the two cycles could itself be wrong. Here, it seemed to make sense to separate out the two peaks, but you’ll see once Scott is up and I’m still sleeping, I continue to have that double peak pattern all by my lonesome:

Still, an overall pattern does appear to emerge. I go through regular cycles, but ones that jump rapidly from near awake-ness to deep sleep. Of course, by the third example, it’s equally possible I’ve begun constructing (vs. observing) such a pattern. Look how simple I’ve made my sky-scraper-esque chart, at the cost of giving Scott something much more erratic:

Assuming that I do tend toward extremes in my sleep patterns, those steep cyclical slopes might explain why I have such a hard time sleeping soundly, since they imply that when I wake up, I wake up hard. At the same time, these charts imply that I spend almost no time in the “dreaming” part of sleep, and I’m definitely a dreamer: long, involved dreams I often remember after waking. I have these dreams during short naps as well as overnight stretches, and feel like they run right up until morning.

Wait, crap, did I learn anything? /Falls asleep at keyboard.

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“Aeneas (But Never on the Tide)”

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Bonnie

Continuing the proud tradition of bad automatic poetry generated in the rich creative environment that is the BART, here’s a piece seeded with the word “Aeneas.” Why yes, I am sensing a trend. This is what happens when you spend a semester translating but barely getting to talk about Latin: it comes oozing out the edges of your squishy subconscious.

–

“Aeneas (But Never on the Tide)”

Aeneas, my boy, who
told you not to stray from home
where no one knows you or could begin
to trickle toward
that offering?

You who always told me never
throw a stone when you see
a stone,
who told me never go running without knowing
exactly where my mind
might go and what it will feel like
tomorrow.

Aeneas, boy, who taught you
to talk to strangers? Beautiful strangers
are the things that walk between
the signs. But they will never love
you, boy. They will always want
to know where you
have been.

I bet, yes, I know the thing that went from you
when every other thing would stay.
Here, boy, is what I was meaning
to tell you before
the world
gave in:

I don’t know which way
the city fell. And this is what it looks like
for you tomorrow,
child, on the waves
but never on the tide.

Posted in I made a thing!, Poetry | 1 Comment

What happens when art students follow instructions literally

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Bonnie

The lecture and workshop on homosexuality in video games that I gave a week or two back at The University of Gotland’s GAME department seemed to go over quite well. Incidentally, during the workshop portion–which involved breaking students into groups and having them create ideas for games with more mindful inclusion of LGBT elements–one student drew this:

Why yes, that is a “hard gay” chihuahua. Drawing materials had been passed out so that students could mock up character designs for animals in a theoretical social game based around anthropomorphized pets. This was slightly more, though definitely less cutesy than what I was expecting:

The student who drew that awesome chihuahua only showed it to the class after a decent amount of prodding. I think she expected me to be mad; I was busy thinking “Best Folsom accessory ever!” Clearly she saw the glee on my face, because she brought it to me after class as a “present.” This is why I heart artists. And Sweden. Normally not chihuahuas though. In this case I will make an exception.

Posted in Awesomeness of others, Gay gay-ity gay, Video games | 1 Comment

“Re-Writing Lolita: Nabokov Fan Fiction and the Reader as Literary Rebel”

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Bonnie

The structured procrastination, she continues. In the midst of writing seminar papers and preparing to fly to Visby, I cobbled together an abstract for another grad student conference from an essay I wrote last year on Lolita and fan fiction. The conference, “Agency and Its Limits,” is happening at Stanford in April; from the call for papers it sounds like they’re interested in the reader as responding subject, and such. Ah, but are they interested in X-Men/Nabokov slash?

—

“Re-Writing Lolita: Nabokov Fan Fiction and the Reader as Literary Rebel”

First and foremost, Lolita is a book about recreating the world through writing. Humbert Humbert’s posthumously discovered manuscript, his obsession with literary references, even Lolita–who proves less a flesh-and-blood girl than a text–allow our most unreliable of narrators to rewrite his life through literature. This has, in turn, inspired countless readers to respond to the novel with their own writing and revisions. Prodigious work by academic scholars joins book-length fiction (e.g. Lo’s Diary, a rewriting of Humbert’s narrative through the eyes of Lolita) along with filmic and dramatic reinterpretations in the long list of material produced by readers who take a cue from Humbert and use their writing to recreate his world. In fact, the readers who have claimed the most agency over the original are also those with the least writerly “authority”: amateur “fan fiction” enthusiasts publishing their own short stories about Humbert and Lo online.

This paper will engage in a close reading of a piece of Lolita fan fiction, “A Veritable Lolita.” Written by one of the literally hundreds of thousands of anonymous authors on FanFiction.net, “A Veritable Lolita”–which re-envisions the young Dolores as a fresh-faced X-Man–raises questions of lowbrow vs. highbrow writing, creativity and authorship, and going beyond “the canon.” As social commentators like MIT’s Henry Jenkins have noted, internet communities like FanFiction.net, which have flourished over the last two decades, “constitute a scandalous category in contemporary American culture, one that… provokes an excessive response from those committed to the interests of textual producers.” It is response that the rebellious reader harnesses in rewriting Lolita, the legacy of which is always being rewritten.

Posted in Academia, Analysis, I made a thing!, Literature, Speaking engagements | Leave a comment

Bonnie goes to Sweden, talks about everything ever

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Bonnie

There appears to be a decently high chance that I will be up and flying to Visby this Sunday to speak at the University of Gotland. Gotland, as I, a member of the geographically largely uneducated, have only recently learned, is a chunk of Sweden separated from the mainland by some cold, cold Baltic Sea. There it will be snowing. My it-dropped-below-50-I’m-freezing San Francisco self will show up doubtless unprepared.

The university runs a course in video games and human rights, and they’ve invited me to talk for an hour (or three) to 200-ish students about sex/gender in games. The teacher in me having been recently rekindled by this semester’s grad student instructing, I’m toying with the idea of putting together more of a lesson plan than a lecture. Circle up, everyone, and share…

Specifically, I’m daydreaming of a creative lesson, something like “Re-Doing Sex/Gender in Games,” which would get broken down into three sections (gender, sexuality, and sex). For each, I’d talk a bit about how these currently work, what their role is in the community, and show clips of game content. Then, after identitying problematics, I’d have student work in teams to come up with their own content: character design, storylines that include sexuality, sex mechanics.

From there they’d present, and we’d critique as a group. The idea would be to get these students, potential future game designers, thinking critically about ways to do things differently. Of course, there are lots of things that could go wrong: covering too much territory (first and foremost), having the wrong kind of room for group work, shy attendees — hell, even the basic going-to-Sweden thing might fall through.

In any case, it’s lovely to be thinking about games again. Soon it’ll be back to writing about surrealist illustrations of Sade and Kafka as a precursor to cybersex. Oh, the shackles of academia…

Posted in Gay gay-ity gay, Speaking engagements, Travel, Video games | 2 Comments

I am Captain James T. Hook

Posted on November 21, 2010 by Bonnie

Yes, I am oddly pleased with this year’s Halloween costume. Hook is, surprise surprise, one of my childhood favorites, and when the idea of building Ursula’s tentacles out of stockings fell through, a felt mustache, a pair of fishnets, and a plastic impaling device were clearly the next best options.

You know why I love Disney villains, right? Right? Gender-bending, overt sexuality and what? It’s all pretty standard Bonnie but it fills me with gooey, gooey joy.

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