Project Progressing

Weve thought alot about our project moving forwards, showing the differences between blondes and brunettes.we thought about having the imvu characters which we are creating as complete opposites of ourselves, maybe making them so that they are a reflection of what we want to try and do in our lives but are too afraid maybe, or dont know what we would end up looking like. For instance, i would really love to dye my hair red or brunnette, but i am worried that i might look odd. Also there are things that we could change about our appearances that once again we wouldn't imagine going to have surgery on. Online, with our imvu avatars, or characters, we can show that you can be anyone you want, you can even change parts of your body, make yourself younger, etc, and so in this way we could reinforce the idea that you can lie about whatever you want online.

Dumb Blonde?

Blondes Have More Fun.

But do you know that blondes apparently have more fun as they are seen as more promiscuous and easy? Nice. But before you brunnettes use this little bit of info as fuel against us know that Wikipedia says that the reason blondes get this horrible and (wrong) information is because throughout history blonde people have been seen as more desirable as most people had dark hair and darker skin. So blondes were seen as prettier as brunettes simply because there were fewer of them, they were different from the norm.

"Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, under the aegis of University of St Andrews, published a study in March 2006 in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior that says blond hair evolved very quickly at the end of the last Ice Age by means of sexual selection.[4] According to the study, the appearance of blond hair and blue eyes in some northern European women made them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males. The study argues that blond hair was produced higher in the Cro-Magnon descended population of the European region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses and finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men. This hypothesis argues that women with blond hair posed an alternative that helped them mate and thus increased the number of blonds.
According to the authors of The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994), blond hair became predominant in Europe in about 3000 BC, in the area now known as Lithuania, among the recently arrived Proto-Indo-European settlers though the trait spread quickly through sexual selection into Scandinavia when that area was settled because men found women with blond hair attractive.[5][6]"


We've used this idea in our project to show a woman searching for perfection, starting off by changing her hair, to a BLONDE, of course...

Project

Right, so, time to think about a final performance for virtuality and performance, and me and Amy have formed a blonde group, as always agreed. We are talking mostly about how easy the internet is to lie on and how you could be anyone on the internet as long as you knew how to lie. We thought we could base our idea on the idea of an avatar based communication program called IMVU, which lets you talk to anyone around the world, through the internet. You can create your own character and become a person on IMVU to talk to others, make friends, or even lovers i suppose. We are thinking we could record some of IMVU, maybe a conversation between the virtual amy and myself, with the virtual characters lying to each other and us acting out a script in front of the filmed characters, being ourselves, talking for real, or expressing how wrong the writing of our characters' really is, compared to our own views. This is obviously just, our first thinking, we will update it!!!

cool??

What constitutes something to be cool?? Is it what i think is cool? or you think is cool? again, what is cool? cool must surely being something defined by n individual themselves...for instance, i think that some movies are cool. And also that cool is a state that someone can attain, like a state of mind. I remember going to school in Michigan and everyone at school had just started using the word cool. All the cool kids say cool. Lol, and cool is often defined by celebrities, like the ones down the side of the page. they made blonde cool, or the new cool dress, the new cool look. Is cool just plain boring? and over used. Im beginning to think so.

What constitutes a good performance?-its not finished btw i dnt think

What constitutes a worthwhile performance?

To think of what constitutes a worthwhile performance, I must first look at performance as a whole. Wikipedia states that in ‘performing arts, people behave in a particular way for another group of people (the audience.)’ It also goes on to list various types of performing genres. Plays, films, ballet, concerts, magician’s shows, performance art and the circus are merely some that are listed. I have to also think of how far performance has gone in the space of our culture. Performance now moves into ideas of non-audience actions, for instance, invisible theatre, where the audience have no idea that they are infact, the audience.
This idea can be seen in YouTube, one of the most popular websites viewed on the web, where people are recorded and posted online, sometimes without their knowledge. My friend recently went out to milsom street and chalked hop scotch on the ground, he then sat, filmed and watched as people passed the chalk without notice, or jumped along, when I watched this it showed me how people seemed to be revisiting their childhoods as they just played along with the chalk game scralled on the floor. There is also an idea of how we live in a performative society, which is dicatated by its culture. Society is based upon the government, the government is run by politicians and the people asking for what they want, in a democracy that is. So why is it that there is so much propaganda needed for the politicians to survive? The Daily Mail for instance, a newspaper quite clearly controlled by the government, makes fun of politicians in comic strips and even articles. Do we need this performance to keep thinking that the government and its people have free speech?
A performance to keep the peace as it were, didn’t Hitler use performance to do this in Germany though? Propaganda went so far as theatre, film, etc. But we did this also with Mrs. Miniver in World War Two, to gain backing for troops fighting for England. Performance moved from simply seeming to act in a certain way, to actual film, actual moves into Hollywood.
Performance nowadays seems to have changed into something that has less definition. This relates to the way the internet has taken away many copyrights; it has taken away what we think of as performance. The audience do not know they are the audience and the performers sometimes do not even know they’re performers. However, this raises new questions, are you the audience when listing to buskers when on your way through town centre? Are you a performer when your friend records you on their phone when you are simply on a night out? When does real life blurr into performative reality? Personal views must be taken into account when thinking of performance aswell when we start to look at a worthwhile performance.
When trying to asses what is a worthwhile performance you have to think in your own ideals of what you like in a performance. For instance, I love films, I am a very avid cinema go-er and love it. I also love theatre, however, I am not a fan of extreme theatre, I find classical to be the best, most worthwhile theatre for me. My friends disagree and think that a worthwhile performance can be anything that anyone has bothered to listen to. I doubt that me watching a YouTube video of a young man singing something awful, is the same as watching Shakespeare at the Globe.
However, I also believe that a worthwhile performance should be defined as anything that is justified and has a point to be made. I see why people would watch certain things or experience performance in different ways, I just have a hard time myself in understanding why they see this as a worthwhile use of their time.

Clickable Culture

i found this link funnily enough off of that Second Life website that scared the hell out of me.



http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/C90/



Its basically a blog that talks about internet culture. A culture that seems to have stemmed from the creation of a computer and the internet. There is a new media culture. One which has taken over many people. This site describes many parts of this culture, and gives people the chance to comment on it. I am not a stranger to video games, computer games, online streaming to watch videos, etc. I know how to download what i want, watch what i want, play what i want, but this website seems to assume that by putting things onto the internet that they have taken a new form.

This reminds me of the video we watched in the first week off of Ian's blog, where it stated that text was linear when written, but not when typed, that Copywright laws would have to be changed. This is very interesting. As it seems to be true. On this blog you can look up all types of media communication and many other types of forms of knowledge that is freely availiable on the culture of the internet.



You can get taught online by teachers of all levels, get exam and essay help, get a health analysis if you don't know what is wrong with you, seek legal advice, etc.

Second Blonde

To follow up on my last post, Technology is actually taking over the world.

The Matrix is real. It is! look: http://secondlife.com/

Why are we creating a world within a world?

"Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe. "

In this place you can create a vision of yourself, an avatar to represent you in this second world. You can be a respectable, say doctor by day, and by night on Second Life, you can become a dirty harlet! It's quite worrying to think that millions of people who inhabit Earth with us, have to leave their own real lives to enter second life and start a new one!

"Second Life is about personal expression and your avatar is the most personal expression of all. After all, an avatar is your persona in the virtual world. The picture below shows how easy it is to create your avatar. Despite offering almost infinite possibilities, the tool to personalize your avatar is very simple to use and allows you to change anything you like, from the tip of your nose to the tint of your skin. Don't worry if it's not perfect at first, you can change your look at any time. "

This website has become so large that recording artists actually play live on Second Life. A world within a world.A life within a life. In one sense its great, the person you feel you cant be in life you can be online, you can buy, create, build, meet people all on Second Life, but isnt that just slightly wrong? You are interacting with people yes, but through a machine, surely the machine has taken a larger role than just a way of communication, it has become your life.