Avatar Design Research - Call for Participation...

Here I am posing with a screenshot of my sample research participation consent form. This form has been modified on a template created by Tom Boellstorff (Tom Bukowski in SL). In fact, this picture was taken on location at Boellstorff's "Ethnographia" property.

My official thesis research is about to begin, please read the text below and if you are interested in participating, please let me know...

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION – AVATAR DESIGN WORKSHOP AND FOCUS GROUP

Do you like to make unique avatars? Are you interested in Modern Art? Have you ever wanted to perfect your design skills through the critical input of your peers?

A Graduate Student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada is studying avatar design in Second Life and is looking for participants who would be willing and interested in contributing a small portion of their time to developing this academic research.

Interested participants would be involved in a small 2-4 hour workshop session one day and a follow-up focus group for 1-2 hours involving an avatar design critique session with peers.

Both sessions will take place on Odyssey Island which is the home to many esteemed contemporary avatar artists, critics and designers. http://odysseyart.ning.com

The researcher plans to watch participants create avatars based on established Modern Art design guidelines borrowed from Art-History to see if they still translate into interesting and useful avatar design.

The research will be taking snapshots and video of the avatar creators during the building process so they can be critiqued during the peer review session.

At the end of this research, the researcher will write about the strengths and limitations of using Modernist guidelines to inform avatar design in Second Life and other next generation virtual worlds.

All participants will own the rights to their own avatar creations being generated during this workshop.

The researcher will only document these designs in order to visually illustrate their relationship to the theoretical frame-work.

Any potential participants must meet this criteria:

1 – Genuine interest in designing avatars – especially designing for themselves as well as for clients/friends/other people.
2 – Some arts background (including arts produced exclusively in SL)
3 – Relative fluency in navigating the building controls in Second Life.
4 – Reasonable fluency in English (written) and/or ability to use an in-world translator effectively.
5 - The willingness to allow their avatar designs made in this case-study session to be publicized, documented and researched by the author.
6 – The willingness to participate for the duration of the research project.
7 – Professes not to be a member of a captive population (inmate), psychiatric in-patient nor a youth under the age of 19.
8 – The willingness to sign a consent form (over the age of 19).

If you are interested, please reply with your name (SL name only is fine), background, contact information availability (including your local time zone) and specific design interests.

Please submit a notecard with your proposal to uuuuuuu Heliosense, or via email jot@sfu.ca

Replies of interest must be received by August 10, 2009. Potential participants will be notified of the status of their participation by August 13, 2009 for sessions happening on the following week.

For more information, please contact uuuuuuu Heliosense in-world or Jeremy Owen Turner at jot@sfu.ca

Lag Limbo...

Here is my disembodied avatar form trying to manifest itself in a location that resembles some sort of waterfront cemetary.

I tried to log into Second Life today and the sluggish bandwidth available to me in IRL (In Real Life) limited the scope and scale of my usual telepresent agency. Being unformed and unable to move is actually a process that many avatars unfortunately have to cope with in Second Life.

However, being lagged down in liminal limbo is not really an obstacle to my academic research.

As a matter of fact, I am very curious to note what happens when an avatar cannot be properly embodied in a realtime virtual world such as Second Life. Does the obvious immobility and etheric nature of my avatar form more accurately reveal (and represent) the essense of fluctuating levels of telepresence ca. 2008?

This temporal state of being somewhere in-between the dimensions of "here" and "not-here" has been discussed recently with regards to the sporadic agency-state commonly known as AFK (away from keyboard).

In my specific case, I felt for a few minutes in-world as if I was actually AFA (away from agency) since I was trying desperately to interact with the virtual world but without much (perceivable) luck.

I guess it was not too much of a big deal to be denied a sense of immediate agency since this current situation also reflects my present state of mind - waiting...waiting...waiting...

I am waiting for interviews to happen...maybe I will finally score my first interview in a few days with Jeffrey Ventrella on the subject of avatar body communication/language.

I have asked many other interview subjects and hopefully, I can schedule some interviews with them very soon but for now, I wait....

Somehow, I managed to teleport my avatar to another location...

....and wait....


....and wait....


...and wait....at least I have found a formal interviewing area to wait in...



...even after waiting several minutes in Second Life, my cached memory was still unable to detect exactly where the interview room was....sigh!

Avoiding the Void - The Avatar as a Social Framework...

Here I am as a 4 seater chair-arrangement at Princeton University. To my left stands a gray rezzing avatar gazing in astonishment at my non-anthropomorphic (but certainly anthro-friendly) appearance. If I decide to engage in qualitative interviews with 4 subjects for a group discussion, my avatar body is now ideally equipped for the occasion.

Be my guest, take a seat...take a seat on my body!

One of my experiments is to assume an avatar form that appears to reflect my explicit and implicit strategies for role-playing within Second Life as an "objective" researcher for some of the more strictly Modernist case studies.

Many interviewing avatars assume generic humanoid template forms when they go out "into the field" to conduct interviews and I think their actual avatar appearance and newbie presence becomes an inhibiting factor when it comes to "removing the reseacher from the research".

As a result, I was hoping that my avatar form during interviews literally resembled more of a framework for interviewing than an "interviewer", per se. I feel that the subjects can be more comfortable answering my questions when my active presence and inquisitive agency is aesthetically neutralized. In this sense, my avatar form is the purification of the emergent notion of embodied context. I become the embodiment and personification of the interviewing context itself rather than simply that of an additional interviewing subject.

Assuming the form of a seating arrangement, I believe that I strike a healthy balance between pure empirical neutrality (being invisible) and sporadic qualitative agency. By avoiding the void and becoming the very social framework for academic interaction, my role as an interviewer can become privileged without over-emphasizing a hierarchical bias.

By appearing as a seating arrangement rather than an overt avatar form, my subjects can relax around me and take their time to formulate their responses to my deep and probing questions. If more than one avatar subject is being interviewed at the same time, they might even forget that I am in the room with them and therefore, I can listen in and record their responses without too much ontological interruption.

So, I decided to go into one of the designer furniture stores and select a couple of seating arrangements to act as my avatar form during some of my avatar interviews and research gathering.

For example, when I invite 2 people to act as interview subjects, I would hope that they merge with my body by sitting directly on top of me (part of my body is a seat, after all). I have 2 & 4 seat avatars ready to go and now I just need to find a one-seater for those extremely intimate one-on-one interviews.

For more intimate qualitative encounters, two avatars can sit on my body and they can comfortably engage in leisurely discourse or perhaps if they allow me to enter into the discussion, a trialogue.


Here I am as a two-seater chair set looking for some avatars to scoop up onto my lap. Very soon, I plan to blog about some of the intimate and interactive interviews that I hope to score sometime soon with some academic luminaries... I hope to conduct these interviews in the Second Life Interview Corner if I am allowed. Otherwise, I am free to roam around the metaverse and conduct realtime field research whenever the timing feels right.