|
Gliding Bodies: Continued: In our mediated age, communications theorist Paul Virilio calls for a new state of being, a state that he calls trajectivity: "Between the subjective and the objective," he says, there should be "the 'trajective,' that being of movement from here to there, from one to the other, without which we will never achieve a profound understanding of the various regimes of perception of the world that have succeeded each other throughout the ages" (24). Each point in place on our journey through the textual space of the Glide Collabyrinth is a specific embodied position that is always in the process of becoming something else. And it is our journey through our own collaborative act of storytelling that engenders the dynamic embodiment for us as performers. This text attempts to engage all of our senses in virtuality, drawing us into the game world through opulent graphics and interactive features. Slattery snags our attention through her use of interactivity to incorporate us into the plotline of her fiction and her world. We are co-opted and interpolated precisely because her project is a cyberfeminist one. Like other fine cyberfeminist works-including Natalie Bookchin's The Intruder, Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls and Shelley Jackson's 'My Body': A Wunderkammer -these texts are ultimately narratological processes, using stories as doorways to invite us in. According to Cassell, 'storytelling is a nexus of change in the relationship between gender and technology' that works to create constructs of the self (311). Glide foregrounds subjectivities as movement, and achieves the interactivity that most games only twitch and shoot at by requiring us to undertake the act of creation in visual language. We cannot help but be transformed by the nature of this new visual alphabet as we alter our perspective to find ways to write and to dance it.
Works Cited Bookchin, Natalie. The Intruder. 1999. Cassell, Justine. "Storytelling as a Nexus of Change in the Relationship Between Gender and Technology: A Feminist Approach to Software Design." From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Eds. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge: MIT, 1998. 298-326. de Lauretis, Teresa. "The Technology of Gender." Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1992. 1-30. Fisher, Caitlin. These Waves of Girls. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge and London: MIT, 2001. Jackson, Shelley. 'My Body': A Wunderkammer. Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1993. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1997. Old Boys' Network. "100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism." 1997. Slattery, Diana Reed (with Daniel O'Neil and Bill Brubaker).
Glide: The Maze Game. Website. 1999-2002. Slattery, Diana Reed. The Maze Game. Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Publications, 2002 Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso, 1997. VNS Matrix. "Cyberfeminist Manifesto." Wilding, Faith. "The Future is Femail." Posted to the nettime mailing list (18 Sept 1998). Yoon, Hyoejin. "Technology and Subjectivity: Lauretis/Technology of Gender." 15 May 02
<< Return to Cyberfeminism Introduction |