[ISEA2019] Paper: Meredith Drum — More Than a Render: Digital Humans and the Politics of Representation

Abstract

Keywords: Animation, avatars, cultural studies, digital bodies, feminism, game studies, gender, media representation, scopic regime, virtual humans

This paper addresses the politics of virtual representation of human bodies by focusing on two realms of on-line media: educational tutorials for modeling female avatars and market-places that sell virtual humans. As a professor who teaches 3D digital modeling and animation, I set out to empower my students with the critical language to unpack these problematic objects. Through reading and discussing D. Fox Harrell’s writing about phantasms, my students and I together dissect the ideology at work within these constructs, and we think through the mechanisms that allow these phantasms to appear socially real even though they are “rooted in processes of imaginative cognition.”[1] As part of this pedagogical and creative project, I have begun an ethnographic study comprised of an ongoing dialogue with the makers of web-based tutorials and the creators of digital humans for purchase. Through this research I am developing a stronger understanding of how virtual humans are produced and how they function in the marketplace. In turn, I am enabled, and my students are empowered, to build new phantasms to participate in less-violent, more inclusive worlds.

  • Meredith  Drum  is  a  research-based  artist   and   professor. She produces videos and animations as  single-screen  shorts  and multi-screen installations; in addition  to  her  solo  work  she often collaborates with other visual artists as well as  dancers, writers, urban planners, computer programmers, and scientists on book projects, public  art,  movement  research,  and augmented reality initiatives. Her work is influenced by feminist art history, cinema studies, environmental justice, feminist science studies, game studies, science fiction, multispecies anthropology, and contemporary visual culture.

Full text (PDF) p. 578-580