Ken Hillis: Digital Sensations. Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (1999)

Considers the cultural and philosophical assumptions underlying virtual reality, and how the technology affects the real world.

Virtual reality is in the news and in the movies, on TV and in the air. Why is the technology—or the idea—so prevalent precisely now? What does it mean—what does it do—to us? Digital Sensations looks closely at the ways representational forms generated by communication technologies—especially digital/optical virtual technologies—affect the “lived” world.

Virtual reality, or VR, is a technological reproduction of the process of perceiving the real; yet that process is “filtered” through the social realities and embedded cultural assumptions about human bodies, perception, and space held by the technology’s creators.

Through critical histories of the technology—of vision, light, space, and embodiment—Ken Hillis traces the various and often contradictory intellectual and metaphysical impulses behind the Western transcendental wish to achieve an ever more perfect copy of the real. Because virtual technologies are new, these histories also address the often unintended and underconsidered consequences–such as alienating new forms of surveillance and commodification–flowing from their rapid dissemination. Current and proposed virtual technologies reflect a Western desire to escape the body, Hillis says.

Exploring topics from VR and other, earlier visual technologies, Hillis’s penetrating perspective on the cultural power of place and space broadens our view of the interplay between social relations and technology.

Volume 1 of Electronic mediations
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1999
ISBN 0816632510, 9780816632510
Length 271 pages

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Critical Art Ensemble (1994-2006)

The Electronic Disturbance (1994)

The Critical Arts Ensemble is a virtual collective. This collection of essays and short pieces examines the changing rules of cultural and political resistance: “The current technological revolution has created a new geography of power relations — as data, human beings confront an authoritarial impulse that thrives on absence. As a virtual geography of cognizance and action, resistance must assert itself in electronic space.”

ISBN: 1570270066
Pub Date: 05/01/1994
Publisher: Autonomedia

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Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (1997)

In the age of global, nomadic capital, the CAE attempts to lay the foundation for the growth of nomadic resistance. Utilizing the tools of its enemy, the CAE suggests that a new cultural and political resistance is possible. Fusing a situationist-influenced concept of contestational art, an understanding of the parallel nature of cultural and political action borrowed from Gramsci, and a hacker’s deep understanding of how new technology functions, ECD is a launch point for debating the nature of power and resistance in the information age.

ISBN: 9781570270567
Pub Date: 05/01/1997
Publisher: Autonomedia

Paper by Stefan Wray
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Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness (1998)

Having elsewhere explored the dimensions of social and political control in electronic culture, the Critical Arts Ensemble here turns full frontal towards the body, arguing that utopian promises of virtuality are simple distractions from the real project: the deployment of biotechnologies upon the bodies of citizens in the service of the transnational order.

ISBN: 9781570270673
Pub Date: 03/01/1998
Publisher: Autonomedia

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Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (2000)

Essays in cultural politics and technology from the collective authors of Electronic Disturbance, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Flesh Machine. Chapters in this new volume include “Electronic Civil Disobedience and the Public Sphere,” “The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net,” “The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology,” “Observations on Collective Cultural Action,” “Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance,” “Contestational Robotics,” “Children as Tactical Media Participants,” and “The Financial Advantages of Anti-Copyright.”

ISBN: 1570271194
Pub Date: 04/01/2000
Publisher: Autonomedia

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The Molecular Invasion (2002)

Having exhausted the possibilities for geographic colonial expansion, as well as reaching the fiscal limitations of virtual space, capital begins its invasion of a new frontier — organic molecular space. The Critical Art Ensemble began mapping this development in Flesh Machine (Autonomedia, 1998) by examining the use of reproductive technologies and their promise for achieving an intensified degree of control over worker and citizen. The Molecular Invasion acts as a companion to this first book by mapping the politics of transgenics, and offering a model for the creation of a contestational biology, as well as providing direct interventionist tactics for the disruption of this new assault on the organic realm.

Paperback: 140 pages
Publisher: Autonomedia (April, 2002)
ISBN-10: 1570271380
ISBN-13: 978-1570271380

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Marching Plague: Germ Warfare and Global Public Health (2006)

The sixth Critical Art Ensemble book offers a radical reframing of the rhetoric surrounding germ warfare. After refuting the idea that massive biological attack is a probable future occurrence, the book goes on to argue that biological weapons programs primarily serve the economic interests of the military-security complex, squandering resources needed to fight the massive loss of life each year from emerging infectious diseases. The book also includes two appendices examining the case of the U.S. Justice Department against Steve Kurtz, for which the original manuscript of the book was seized in the state’s investigation.

Published by Autonomedia, 2006
ISBN 157027178X, 9781570271786
148 pages

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Direct download: The Molecular Invasion [Croatian]

Religion and cyberspace

Religion and Cyberspaceexplores how religious individuals and groups are responding to the opportunities and challenges that cyberspace brings. It asks how religious experience is generated and enacted online, and how faith is shaped by factors such as limitless choice, lack of religious authority, and the conflict between recognized and non-recognized forms of worship. Combining case studies with the latest theory, its twelve chapters examine topics including the history of online worship, virtuality versus reality in cyberspace, religious conflict in digital contexts, and the construction of religious identity online. Focusing on key themes in this groundbreaking area, it is an ideal introduction to the fascinating questions that online religion presents.

Religion and cyberspace
By Morten T. Højsgaard, Margit Warburg
Edition: illustrated
Published by Routledge, 2005
ISBN 0415357632, 9780415357630
207 pages
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Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader

World of Warcraft is the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), with (as of March 2007) more than eight million active subscribers across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, who play the game an astonishing average of twenty hours a week. This book examines the complexity of World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultural and social implications of the proliferation of ever more complex digital gameworlds. The contributors have immersed themselves in the World of Warcraft universe, spending hundreds of hours as players (leading guilds and raids, exploring moneymaking possibilities in the in-game auction house, playing different factions, races, and classes), conducting interviews, and studying the game design–as created by Blizzard Entertainment, the game’s developer, and as modified by player-created user interfaces. The analyses they offer are based on both the firsthand experience of being a resident of Azeroth and the data they have gathered and interpreted.

The contributors examine the ways that gameworlds reflect the real world–exploring such topics as World of Warcraft as a “capitalist fairytale” and the game’s construction of gender; the cohesiveness of the gameworld in terms of geography, mythology, narrative, and the treatment of death as a temporary state; aspects of play, including “deviant strategies” perhaps not in line with the intentions of the designers; and character–both players’ identification with their characters and the game’s culture of naming characters. The varied perspectives of the contributors–who come from such fields as game studies, textual analysis, gender studies, and postcolonial studies–reflect the breadth and vitality of current interest in MMOGs.

Contributors:
Espen Aarseth, Hilde G. Corneliussen, Charlotte Hagstrom, Lisbeth Klastrup, Tanya Krzywinska, Jessica Langer, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jill Walker Rettberg, Scott Rettberg, T. L. Taylor, Ragnhild Tronstad.

Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader
By Hilde Corneliussen, Jill Walker
Contributor Hilde Corneliussen
Edition: illustrated
Published by MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262033704, 9780262033701
336 pages

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Digital sensations: space, identity, and embodiment in virtual reality

Virtual reality is in the news and in the movies, on TV and in the air. Why is the technology — or the idea — so prevalent precisely now? What does it mean — what does it do — to us? Digital Sensations looks closely at the ways representational forms generated by communication technologies — especially digital/optical virtual technologies — affect the “lived” world.

Virtual reality, or VR, is a technological reproduction of the process of perceiving the real; yet that process is “filtered” through the social realities and embedded cultural assumptions about human bodies, perception, and space held by the technology’s creators.

Through critical histories of the technology — of vision, light, space, and embodiment — Ken Hillis traces the various and often contradictory intellectual and metaphysical impulses behind the Western transcendental wish to achieve an ever more perfect copy of the real. Because virtual technologies are new, these histories also address the often unintended and underconsidered consequences — such as alienating new forms of surveillance and commodification — flowing from their rapid dissemination. Current and proposed virtual technologies reflect a Western desire to escape the body Hillis says.

Exploring topics from VR and other, earlier visual technologies, Hillis’s penetrating perspective on the cultural power of place and space broadens our view of the interplay between social relations and technology.

Digital sensations: space, identity, and embodiment in virtual reality
By Ken Hillis
Edition: illustrated
Published by U of Minnesota Press, 1999
ISBN 0816632502, 9780816632503
271 pages
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The Virtual

Rob Shields unravels the origins and the many contemporary meanings of the virtual as a concept. Shields dissects the history of the virtual world and takes his analysis beyond the technologies themselves to show how the virtual has infiltrated our daily lives at every level. From the moral panics over paedophile stalkers on the net to the automated telemarketing that interrupts our dinners and clogs our answer phones to the laptops which keep us connected to the office twenty four hours a day, technology has become an integral part of modern living. With insight and clarity, The Virtual reveals how technology has become virtually entwined in contemporary society.

The virtual
By Rob Shields
Published by Routledge, 2003
ISBN 0415281806, 9780415281805
246 pages
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Tom Boellstorff: Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (2008)

Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love–the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. Coming of Age in Second Lifeis the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe. Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar “Tom Bukowski,” and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group. Coming of Age in Second Lifeshows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself.

Published by Princeton University Press, 2008
ISBN 0691135282, 9780691135281
316 pages
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Islands in the clickstream: reflections on life in a virtual world

Richard Thieme is one of the most visible commentators on technology and society, appearing often on CNN radio, TechTV, and various other national media outlets. He is also in great demand as a public speaker, delivering his Human Dimension of Technology talk to over 50,000 live audience members each year. Islands in the Clickstream is a single volume “best of Richard Thieme.”

CNN called Richard Thieme “a member of the cyber avant-garde”. Digital Delirium named him “one of the most creative minds of the digital generation”. Now Richard Thieme’s wisdom on the social and cultural dimensions of technology is available in a single volume. “Islands in the Clickstream” ranges beyond the impact of technology to spirituality, psychological insight, and social commentary. Now that people are used to living in virtual worlds and move easily between online and offline worlds, they want to connect that experience to the deeper issues of our lives, including spiritual issues. Some examples include “Dreams Engineers Have”, “The Crazy Lady on the Treadmill”, and “Whistleblowers and Team Players”. These essays raise serious questions for thoughtful readers. They have attracted favorable commentary from around the world and a fanatic, almost rabid fan base. This author has become an extremely popular and highly visible talking head. He is a rare “personality” in the otherwise bland world of technology commentators. The book leverages the loyalty of his audience in the same way Bill O’Reilly’s “The O’Reilly Factor” and Al Franken’s “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” do. The book is an easy read intended to provoke thought, discussion and disagreement

Islands in the clickstream: reflections on life in a virtual world
By Richard Thieme, Andrew Briney
Contributor Andrew Briney
Published by Syngress, 2004
ISBN 1931836221, 9781931836227
336 pages
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Virtual theatres: An introduction

Welcome to theatre of the 21st century, in which everything -except for the viewer can be simulated.
Virtual Theatres is the first full-length book of its kind to offer an investigation of the interface between theatre performance and digital arts. Through discussion of a variety of artists and performers – including Stelarc, Orlan, Forced Entertainment, Merce Cunningham and Blast Theory – Gabriella Giannachi analyses the aesthetic concerns of current computer arts practices and shows how they radically question our conventional uses and definitions of time, space, place, character, identity and realness. The book not only allows for a re-interpretation of what is possible in the world of performance practice but also demonstrates how ‘virtuality’ has come to represent a major parameter for our understanding and experience of contemporary art and life.

Virtual theatres: an introduction
By Gabriella Giannachi
Edition: illustrated, reprint
Published by Routledge, 2004
ISBN 0415283787, 9780415283786
174 pages
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Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the Service of the Machine?

The author explores the work of major thinkers and cultural movements that have grappled with the complex relationship between technology, politics and culture. Subjects such as the Internet, cloning, warfare, fascism and Virtual Reality are placed within a broad theoretical context, which explores how humanity might, through technology, establish a more ethical relationship with the world.

Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the Service of the Machine?
By Simon Cooper
Published by Routledge, 2002
ISBN 0415261600, 9780415261609
182 pages
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Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet

In the nineties, neoliberalism simultaneously provided the context for the Internet’s rapid uptake in the United States and discouraged public conversations about racial politics. At the same time many scholars lauded the widespread use of text-driven interfaces as a solution to the problem of racial intolerance. Today’s online world is witnessing text-driven interfaces such as e-mail and instant messaging giving way to far more visually intensive and commercially driven media forms that not only reveal but showcase people’s racial, ethnic, and gender identity.

Lisa Nakamura, a leading scholar in the examination of race in digital media, uses case studies of popular yet rarely examined uses of the Internet such as pregnancy Web sites, instant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures.

While popular media such as Hollywood cinema continue to depict nonwhite nonmales as passive audiences or consumers of digital media rather than as producers, Nakamura argues the contrary—with examples ranging from Jennifer Lopez music videos; films including the Matrix trilogy, Gattaca, and Minority Report; and online joke sites—that users of color and women use the Internet to vigorously articulate their own types of virtual community, avatar bodies, and racial politics.

Lisa Nakamura is associate professor of speech communication and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet and coeditor, with Beth Kolko and Gilbert Rodman, of Race in Cyberspace.

Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet
By Lisa Nakamura
Edition: illustrated
Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816646139, 9780816646135
248 pages
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HyperReality: Paradigm for the Third Millenium

What comes after the Internet? The world of the virtual, a place where you could be hard pressed to know if the person standing next to you is physically real or virtual or whether they have human or artificial intelligence. The Third Millennium promises to bridge the gap between the natural and artificial in new and powerful ways- namely HyperReality. Here there are new scopes for telemedicine, HyperTranslation (to speak in one language and be heard in another), and virtual reality popping out of books, and media to co-exist with us.

This book is edited by two primary actors in the field of HyperReality- Terashima led the team which developed the prototype for HyperReality and its conceptualization, and Tiffin is founder of the first virtual university and a leader on the role of technology in education. HyperReality offers a large window into the future of technology, defining what it is, how it works, and explores the implications of this for everything from medicine to leisure,the elderly and work. The book boasts a list of contributors from around the world and from multiple disciplines- many who have worked directly on the development and application of this new technology.

HyperReality: Paradigm for the Third Millenium
By John Tiffin, Nobuyoshi Terashima
Edition: illustrated
Published by Routledge, 2001
ISBN 0415261031, 9780415261036
165 pages
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Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media

Bodies in Code explores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen’s book shows what they’ve been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it’s the body–not high-tech computer graphics–that allows a person to feel like they are really “moving” through virtual reality. Of course these virtual experiences are also profoundly affecting our very understanding of what it means to live as embodied beings.

Hansen draws upon recent work in visual culture, cognitive science, and new media studies, as well as examples of computer graphics, websites, and new media art, to show how our bodies are in some ways already becoming virtual.

Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
By Mark B. N. Hansen
Edition: illustrated
Published by CRC Press, 2006
ISBN 0415970164, 9780415970167
336 pages
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Modern Organizations in Virtual Communities

As technology continues to advance, its impact on a variety of organizations becomes increasingly more important. With such easy access to the Internet and the opportunity for organizations to reach other organizations and individuals around the world faster and more effciently, modern organizations are rapidly becoming a part of the virtual community. Modern Organizations in Virtual Communities presents a comprehensive collection of research works that describe such organizations, the policies and practices that they have implemented and challenges that they face.

Modern Organizations in Virtual Communities
By Jerzy Kisielnicki
Edition: illustrated
Published by Idea Group Inc (IGI), 2002
ISBN 1931777160, 9781931777162
310 pages
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Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety

Virtual Culture marks a significant intervention in the current debate about access and control in cybersociety exposing the ways in which the Internet and other computer-mediated communication technologies are being used by disadvantaged and marginal groups – such as gay men, women, fan communities and the homeless – for social and political change.

The contributors to this book apply a range of theoretical perspecitves derived from communication studies, sociology and anthropology to demonstrate the theoretical and practical possibilities for cybersociety as an identity-structured space.

Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety
By Steve Jones
Contributor Steve Jones
Edition: reprint
Published by SAGE, 1997
ISBN 0761955267, 9780761955269
262 pages
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