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Proceedings of the SLACTIONS 2012 International Conference
Life, imagination, and work using metaverse platforms
88
Kromosomer – an experience in shared creative work and expression
Heidi Dahlsveen
Oslo and Akershus university college of applied sciences, Norway.
Email: heidi.dahlsveen@hioa.no.
Catarina Carneiro de Sousa
The School of Education Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Portugal.
Email: csousa@esev.ipv.pt.
Kromosomer is a storytelling performance that
interacted with digital, virtual and social media,
using characters from Norwegian legends as a
motto to raise questions on alterety: the "other,
the not normal, the one that looks "different",
which we want to distance ourselves from. The
abject, something outside the subject and object,
prior to the subconscious, something primitive
that has not yet manifested itself symbolically.
Introduction
In the project and performance several artists participated
in a "distributed" dramaturgy where contributed equally,
but creatively independent. Avatars were created, based on
characters from Norwegian legends; they formed the basis
for new stories, mainly mediated through pictures which
were used on a blog, where readers were challenged to
create new stories. There stories were then passed on, either
through social media or orally narrated in the performance.
Participants were also instigated to record pictures and
machinimas. Many of the participants/produsers'
interpretations were later used in the physical performance,
some assembled into a video that was projected on the
walls, others printed to form part of an installation.
Background
The background material for the project was collected
from traditional oral Norwegian legends (sagn). Folklorist
Linda Dégh states that "legend contextualizes" and
interprets belief' (Dégh, 1996). Belief is the core of the
legend, and not only that - the science (knowledge) is a
necessary counterweight when the legend occurs. It is as if
life stumbles along the way, discover something and moves
on. In legends there is a clash between reason and faith.
The logic, the meaning is broken down because we lose
distinction between subject and object, "I" and "the others".
Abject, as Julia Kristeva describes it, is prior to the
subconscious, it is an encounter with something primitive
that has not yet manifested itself symbolically (Kristeva,
1982). Legends are already a way of trying to assimilate
and give symbolic value to the meaningless. Often the
legends portray the meeting with "the other" as a physical
one, but by using avatars in the metaverse one can
experience the embodiment of "the others", thus creating a
process of actually inhabiting alterity, possibly providing
new tools to extend the language that can handle the feeling
of meaninglessness.
The avatars
Jacquelyn Ford Morie notes that in virtual environments
"our experience is very much influenced by how we
perceive our self, and yet, within most immersive
environments, as they exist today, this choice is still made
by the VE designer" (Morie, 2007). Second Life avatars are
unprecedentedly customizable, giving its residents the
ability to design themselves, making embodiment not only
an aesthetic experience but also a creative one.
Legends added a pretext for the exploration of a different
kind of body. Through avatar manipulation in virtual
environments, one can actually experience the embodiment
of "the other". Yee and Bailenson, who studies this process
of inhabiting alterity, argue that "immersive virtual
environments provide the unique opportunity to allow
individuals to directly take the perspective of another" (Yee
et al., 2009), and even suggest the possibility of this
embodied perspective taking having an impact on the
reduction of negative stereotyping (Yee et al., 2009). With
the free distribution of the Kromosomer modifiable avatars
we aimed to promote residents' disposition to have an
active and creative part in the process of their own avatars
design, as well as in the embodiment of the story itself as a
character.
Creative collaboration
The free distribution of the Kromosomer modifiable
avatars promoted a different kind of relation between artists
and public, in this project, that might stride against
traditional roles. Instead of expecting a solely
contemplative audience to an artistic performance, we
proposed a shared creative process. Once the avatars were
distributed they became avatars of others, inhabited by
different identities that could take them literally as the
legends' avatars or radically transform them and use them
Proceedings of the SLACTIONS 2012 International Conference
Life, imagination, and work using metaverse platforms
89
to perform entirely new stories. This process relates to Axel
Bruns' concept of produsage, as a conventional sense of
production no longer applies to "massively distributed
collaborations [...] constantly changing, permanently
mutable bodies of work which are owned at once by
everyone and no-one" and in which the participants easily
shift users to producers and vice-versa, originating a hybrid
role in between (Bruns, 2010).
Metaphores
We call our work process a metaphorical way of working
because in new connections and meetings, we seek to
articulate and give meaning to issues that concern us
(Ricoeur, 2004). A metaphor is not a substitute but an
interaction between two concepts: in their juxtaposition, the
metaphors creates something new.
The virtual body is then a metaphorical one and therefore
a body of expression and language, open to
experimentation and possibility. By offering the avatars
copy enable, transferable, and most importantly,
transformable, we became more than authors, creators or
artists: we were partners in a shared creative flux.
Conclusions
In this project we freed ourselves from space and time,
working with what arises in creative meetings between
concepts such as legends and metaverse, professional
artists and amateurs, different disciplines, different
interpretations, ultimately achieving a poetic function.
Kromosomer generated a completely different way of
working within artistic production, one in which the
frontiers between artist and public are blurred, thus
revealing new parameters and consequently new
possibilities.
REFERENCES
Dégh, L. (1996) What is a Belief Legend? Folklore 107, pp. 33-
46.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Power of horror: An Essay on Abjection.
Columbia University Press, New York.
Morie, J. F. (2007). Performing in (virtual) spaces. Embodiment
and being in virtual environments. International Journal of
Performance Arts and Digital Media, vol. 3, no 2&3, pp. 123-
138.
Yee, N.; Bailenson, J. N.; Ducheneaut, N. (2009). Implications of
Transformed Digital Self-Represatation on Online and Offline
Behavior. Communication Research, vol. 36, no 2, pp. 285-312.
Pearce, C. (2009). Communities of play: emergent cultures in
multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Bogart, Cambridge.
Bruns, A. (2010). Distributed Creativity: Filesharing and
Produsage. In: Sonvilla-Weiss, S. (ed.) Mashup Cultures, pp.
24-37.
Ricoeur, P. (2004). The Rule of Metaphor The Creation of
Meanning Language. Routledge, London.