[ISEA2015] Paper: Alice Ming Wai Jim – Technologies of Self-Fashioning: Virtual Ethnicities in New Media Art

Abstract (Long paper)

Keywords: Self-fashioning, fashion, ethnic apparel, race, gender, colourblind racism, Second Life, virtual worlds, SLart, Skawennati, Time Traveller.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework with which to discuss the critical engagement of media art projects in Second Life with racialized self-representation, fashion and ethnic dress. Examining Montreal-based Mohawk artist Skawennati’s machinima series, TimeTravellerTM (2008-13), a project of selfdetermination, survivance and Indigenous futurity, it argues the critically-aware act of ‘virtually self-fashioning’ racialized borndigital identities, or virtual ethnicities, disrupts ways in which today’s vast proliferation of self-technologies enabling the creation, recreation and management of multiple selves, would otherwise remain complicit with neoliberal colour-blind racism.

  • Alice Ming Wai Jim is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is co-editor of the scholarly journal, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill Publishers, Leiden, NL). She is the 2015 recipient of the Artexte Award for Research in Contemporary Art. From 2003 to 2006, Jim was Curator of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A). Her writings have appeared in publications including Third Text, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, Leonardo, Amerasia Journal, Positions, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Precarious Visualities (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008), Triennial City: Localising Asian Art (2014), Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (2014), Human Rights and the Arts: Perspectives from Global Asia (2014), and Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2015).                  concordia.ca/finearts/art-history/faculty.html?fpid=alice-ming-wai-jim

Full text (PDF)  p. 362-369