Project 1 Concept

Project Outline: Create a short animation (one minute) that deals with issues surrounding the topic "Post-human"

After reading the article in the reader for this subject "Toward embodied virtuality", my initial perception on what it means to be post-human had been drastically altered. When we consider the term "post-human", frightening visions of loss of human values and hostile technological takeover are probably what first comes to mind, but there's a far more subtle side to the issue: the mentality of the individual today. Many theorists argue that we are already in the post-human phase, and puzzled by this concept, I read on. When it was explained, I realised that everything about our visions of post-human stem from this one single concept: post-human deals with the human ability to conceptualise the mind separate from the body.

Using this as a basis, I began to see why we are already in a state of being post-human. One particular area of note is the world of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, and the focus of my proposal is Eve online: a universe of players who fly virtual spaceships in gangs of hundreds, maybe thousands of players. The corporation (a large group of players under one title, known in other MMOs as a guild) that I find most interesting within the game is a corporation called Goonfleet: whose main policy seems to be to ruin the game for the rest of the Eve community, mainly through griefing (see points two and three of the first definition here). The reason Goonfleet are of particular interest is because of the community created outside of the game: on their teamspeak channels, there are reading rooms, music rooms, fleet operation rooms, and other types of social rooms, with around 500 people at a time listening in.

The concept for this animation itself is to take a recording from a fleet operation on teamspeak, in particular the Titan Kill event, and synchronise an animation to it, but not of the actual event: of the actual people playing in their home environment. The concept behind this is to show how absurdly involved the post-human can become in an online environment, leaving their bodies behind in the "real world". This in itself shows exactly how the post-human has become engaged in a completely global society, using only an online persona and conscious to interact with other human beings, and the body has merely become an instrument to interact, much like any other tool we might use.

More detail on style and events to come.