The Adventures of Nar Duell in Second Life – Redux features poster-sized, comic book pages. This work addresses the implications of crafting within the digital through material/virtual hybridity. The pages that make up the sequential art were originally created through digital collage and printed out as oversized comic books. Found visuals, ideas and narratives that have come principally out of the time spent in the virtual world of Second Life, an online, user-created environment, are the foundation for the comic books, supplemented by photography, experiences and sculptures in the concrete world. The comics represent a blend of material life and a virtual existence experienced through an avatar, Nar Duell, the central character in the comic book. Through a human connection to an avatar, the boundaries of the material and the virtual are blurred and become a seamless spectrum—a space of suspension—that can be infinitely mined but never parsed.
The distinct features of The Adventures—photo collage, Joycean dialogue and scale—become the fullest expression of an authored, feminist, translation of the experience of the material/virtual. The dialogue written in a largely singular language consists of a fusion of standard English lexical components, multilingual bon mots, non-linguistic symbols, algebraic, auditory, essentially visual and portmanteau words. The form allows for earnestness, irony, rebellion, and compliance all at the same time—which is an embrace of the double consciousness inherent in the function of comics as well as art methodologies.
The Adventures of Nar Duell in Second Life – Redux at WARC Gallery, Toronto, featured poster-sized, comic book pages formatted for the gallery.
Dobble Debate is an educational card game that uses humour and imagination to promote discussion and teach players about dis- and differing abilities. The project was brought to OCAD University by Nina Czegledy in collaboration with Lynn Hughes of TAG, Concordia University. The project involves OCAD University’s Faculty of Design students and alumni, as well as other researchers at both OCAD and Concordia, in a stimulating, games-based project that has been presented and workshopped extensively.
The goals of the project are to use humour and imagination to look at people’s differing abilities, acquired or genetic ‘disabilities’ as they are traditionally referred to—as potentially conferring an advantage in certain circumstances. The game is played with cards and debate. It is intended to be amusing leading to laughter as players try to make up winning arguments for why a particular ‘disability’ would be a disaster or a real advantage in any given circumstances. The goal is that players still come away with the feeling that any differing ability might be an advantage at times. Furthermore, because the overall experience of the game is lighthearted and imaginative, players are left associating ‘disabilities’ with a positive feeling. The game requires that players learn about the specifics of differing abilities.
The posters were created as part of a series for the research project Craft, Pedagogy and the Digital Challenge, led by principal investigators Lynne Heller and Dorie Millerson. The image is based on the suffragette banner, Standing Together…, by the National Women’s Party, 1913-1920, as photographed in the exhibition Agitprop! at the Brooklyn Museum, 2016 by Alex Kittle.
The hypothesis of this research is that a mother-daughter relationship is a metonymy for a human to avatar affinity. This idea is explored through feminist analysis, a lyric essay and the practice of visual arts, specifically a series of comic books featuring an avatar created in Second Life, an online, user-built virtual world. Through a human connection to an avatar, the boundaries of the material and the virtual are blurred and become a seamless spectrum—a space of suspension—which can be infinitely mined but never parsed. The thesis employs both practice-based (visual art) as well as theoretical (art historical and feminist) frameworks, to explore the spectrum of the material/virtual. The corresponding relationship, artist/avatar is also a spectrum between self and not-self— subject and object at the same time. An avatar is envisioned by an individual creator but is also the result of a necessary collaboration with the developers of the virtual world where the avatar is digitally materialized, so thus another spectrum between the individual and the collective is delineated. By acknowledging the agency that we often confer on images, and the nature of complex identities, the avatar, though ostensibly insentient, is positioned as an animated, mercurial image that encourages a psychologically complex reaction from humans. In linking the feminist analysis of French philosopher-artist, Luce Irigaray, to an affective reaction towards an animated avatar, an argument for a new perspective on a stubbornly enduring mind/body dichotomy is offered. These ideas are poetically echoed in the included artwork and theorized in the interwoven supporting academic analysis. Art-making methods, such as collage/found object, playfulness, and unstable authorship, collectively named in this writing as a methodology of poïesis, is interjected into academic discourse, and literary strategies, and employed in the creative practice to construct a holistic approach to art and knowledge production. De- fining the material as the physically present and the virtual as a collective imagining supported by digital materiality, tools and technology, the resulting gamut becomes an inherently fluid, unstable and contested expanse for which binaries of subject and object, material and virtual, are wholly inadequate. It is a vast, oceanic unknown that supports different ways to dream, from the mundane to the beautiful to the sublime.
This work, both the dissertation and giant colmic book are held in the Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, York University Library, Toronto, ON, Canada.
