 Welcome back to everyone and welcome to those of you who have joined us for the afternoon session. And we are going to go, I think, straight into the next presentation, which is presentation by Andrea Kim. The title of Andrea's presentation is The Myth of Post-Racial Avatars, Anime Girls and the Shojo Ghost and the Cyber Shaman in Virtual Worlds. And I'm going to pass it over to Fox to introduce Andrea. Great. I'm really pleased to have the chance to introduce Andrea because I think it's not only a fascinating but important thesis that she is completing and presenting on today. So it's important for a number of different reasons. I think one is the fact that many people formerly saw virtuality as a nice to have, but as evidenced by this meeting here today, it seems to have become a must-have in so many parts of our world today. But that also means there's a convergence of what these platforms impose upon us and how they allow us to mediate our identities and selves in virtual spaces. And some of the ways that these spaces do so are through pre-constructed characters, through the kind of environments, through the logics that include logics of colonialism, military industrial complex, and much more that again mediate how we present ourselves in these spaces. So this convergence of the ways that virtuality has become a must-have along with the kind of commercial spaces and the ways that they impose constraints upon us. And then sadly also have to say this particular moment and the types of violence and prejudice that exist, including the recent terrorist attacks against Asian people and Asian women in particular all come together in unfortunate ways, but ways that we also have possibility to revise and do better. So the reason I said that Andrea's work is important is because it calls attention to this convergence, the impacts and the nature of it, but also points towards a way out of this and towards a way that people's identities can be a positive resource for the future and a positive resource towards moving beyond violence and prejudice and towards a place of creative and empowering self-expression for the social good. So I'll leave it at that, but I hope that you will join me in welcoming Andrea Kim to present on her thesis work. Thank you. So hello, my name is Andrea Kim and I'd like to introduce my master's thesis, the myth of post-racial avatars, anime girls, the shoujo ghost and the cyber shaman in virtual worlds. So the advertised anime girl can reveal much about how cultural phantasms are actively produced in virtual worlds, not only through the users, but through the computational system itself. Phantasms describe how our mind-body complex blends sensory input such as the anime avatar that reflects aspects of a particular worldview such as that of such that shoujo girls are innocent, cute, feminized objects of affection. Phantasms are only semi-visible and need to be revealed, otherwise they're taken for granted. They're also mysterious, people cannot pin down precisely how they came to be possessed by a particular phantasm. This is a concept put forth by Professor Harrell, who is the advisor to this thesis, also with Dr. Mondahai Bliandelger on the committee. Thank you both for your thoughtful guidance for this research. So the topic of my research, I examined the cultural production of anime girl avatars in VR chat to understand socio-technical relations to virtual world making. Specifically, I focused on world making in the social VR platform VR chat. World making is a term I draw from anthropologist and playwright Doreen Kondo who uses the term to describe how structures of power, labor processes and performances of subjectivity are linked in the theater industry, thinking about making and unmaking of racial constructions, for instance. In my study, I aimed to deconstruct cultural biases embedded in social VR and explore the potential of social VR for digital performance. I asked how does social VR mediate embodied experience and what opportunities does it present for reorienting our approaches to virtuality. For methods, I employ the phantasmal media approach which encompasses an analytic method and a design practice which are both within the scope of this study. I also used ethnographic methods informed by critical theory to immerse audiences into social VR to consider broader implications beyond the medium. I think it's important to note here that also this study is focused on English speaking users in VR chat who are using the referencing shoujo as anime girls as well. As for findings, I discover that cultural biases are embedded into the social VR media ecosystems at a socio-technical level, meaning that the materiality of digital spaces acts upon users and their behaviors. First, social VR embodies new media logics that produce and mask phantasms that affect social relations. Second, aesthetic and data structures of MMD-based avatars are intertwined with values that reproduce tropes about Asian femininity and reduce bodies, digital, physical, femme, Asian, or otherwise as manipulable objects of the colonial male gaze. In this thesis, I argue that being anime is not a post-racial conceit, but one built from a situated cultural imaginary that erases the bodies of Asian girls and women in its construction of virtual personhood. A key insight emerges here. We need more intersectional feminist design of digital avatars that make apparent the racial engendered power dynamics in virtual world making, but also we see an opportunity. Social VR offers new possibilities for identity play and transcultural learning when engaged with a multidisciplinary praxis grounded in values of care. I apply these findings to a design component for which I am developing a working concept of cyber shamanic performance to draw from practices rooted in cultural memory to inform virtual world making. This led to the design of a VR work called A Place of Care, which responds to our contemporary moment in regards to violence against Asian women. So A Place of Care. On March 16th, a month ago, on this day, eight people were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta. Six Asian, seven women. As a Korean-American researching representations of Asian femininity, incidents like this remind me of the deep-rooted cultural violence affected upon migrants, immigrants, and Asian women in America. This writing by Yoon-Kyu, a labor activist, articulates my shared sentiment as they write massage parlors, where people are given touch and intimacy, where you lie your head down to sink into yourself, where a massage worker cares for your body and tries to heal it, and shot a gun into a place of care. Not a religious space, but certainly a sacred space where you feel human and humbled. So A Place of Care invites participants into a massage room to engage with their affective relations to that space. It invites users to address the fears, stigma, or misperceptions learned from mainstream society about body work, especially from Asians and immigrants. Participants can experience the massage room as a place of healing and memory of the lives lost from this senseless violence. In this work, I draw from popular storytelling practices that center voices in the margins. So Social VR. Back to Social VR. And why now? Here we have some popular Social VR platforms, AltSpace, Mozilla Hubs, Facebook Horizon. We see social networking like Facebook, converging with VR as a consumer product, as we see with these images of headsets. Throughout my research in social VR for the past year, I've been to film festivals, experimental theater shows, pole dancing and club venues, a course at Harvard, and many other live event spaces, finding solutions to programming halted from the pandemic. And 2020 has definitely been a big year of experimentation in social VR. And the platform in which I conducted my study is VRChat. VRChat, additionally, to creating and attending a variety of events, users can build their own avatars and virtual worlds in Unity and import them into VRChat. They can build studios or livestream a talk show, go world half popping. And there is a robust community of makers and freelance artists. Ugandan Knuckles, which is a viral meme and video that caused VRChat's popularity to spike in 2018, is a phenomenon that demonstrates the performance of media culture in avatarized form, but also in the way that it reproduces racist behaviors. Ugandan Knuckles remixes a character from the Sonic franchise with a meme into a 3D avatar that users can use usually to troll people with racist about African people. Hatsune Miku is also popular, a virtual idol with a huge global fan base. And Buries in the furry fandom also use VRChat to meet up with friends taking their media and furry embodiment practices into avatarized forms. So not only are characters performed through avatars in VRChat, but also through various media products. The theoretical underpinnings. Digital media studies, cultural studies, and feminist selection theories can offer various angles from which to consider mediation in social VR. So digital media studies gives us insight into the interface between VR and human cognition, media convergence and the cultural logics guiding emergent in media. Cultural studies presents techno-orientalism coined by Morley and Robbins and drawing from Edward Said to refer to discourses emerging after World War II, responding to rapid economic developments in Japan, and shifts in global power. Techno-orientalism thus refers to the idea of the orient that typecast Asians as less human components of techno-virtual worlds to conquer. Techno-orientalism assigns technological and thus inhuman characteristics to Asian people and is an expression of desire to reify global imperialism through technology. And so in this image we see some cyberpunk imagery that predominates popular notions of futurity. And finally I draw from feminist and subaltern theories that emphasize situated and relational knowledges. Feminist and subaltern practices bring worlds into views while critically interrogating the mode of viewing. Concepts like ontoethics or ontoesthetics, ontoepistemologies refer to the inextricable link between being and knowing. And like relational ontologies they require to consider those apparatuses of knowing. In terms of method, in the spirit of situated knowledges I employed auto ethnography. But my auto ethnographic experience was marked by disorientation and not the deconstruction of self as much as the construction of self. So I went on and off VRChat over the course of 10 months and interviewed with 10 VRChat community leaders and world makers, interviews focused on the makers, hosts and content creators and such. From the phantasmal media approach I applied two approaches to challenge negatively bias to phantasms. One is to reveal phantasms by showing them from multiple world views such as the assumptions in each or such that the assumptions within each become clear and secondly creating empowering phantasms that through developing a design practice. Phantasms are a cognitive term that call attention to how phenomena are only semi-visual describing how blending sensory input and a concept rooted in a particular world view produces a new idea. So the phantasms of others are often seen only partially, seem only partially knowable. This mysteriousness is used often to support justifications or explanations of behaviors such as Asian women are submissive because they are from a patriarchal culture. So with phantasmal media in mind I analyzed the MMD 3D model as a data structure from which the anime girl aesthetic came to be and the systems in which they're intertwined. So really quickly for those of you unfamiliar with social VR or VRChat here are some of its affordances. With virtual reality we've got single view perspective perceptual realism meaning that the representations on screen are replicating perception outside of VR and there's a sense of heightened presence as well. Social VR is digitally, you have digitally embodied social presence through voice chat or graphical avatars you're spatially close to others and there's the element of network connectivity. And so when you look in the mirror in terms of the affect or the techno-sensorial relation between our bodies and our avatars studies have shown that when you look at the mirror and have a moment of self-recognition the pairing of the gestural movements and the visual continuity of your avatar increases a sense of embodiment and identification with that avatar figure. Now these affordances of heightened presence also come with some risks. Issues of harassment predominate the early years of social VR and there have been reports that come out that articulate the how PTSD can be triggered through social VR. And so we have here a performance by Michelle Cortez who is a designer for Facebook social VR platform to design it in a more sensitive way that keeps account of bodily autonomy and prevents issues of serious harassment. And so in this performance piece she spends four hours to question different like anime style avatars to like in an investigative way and to see what they have to say. Her performance focuses more on the user agency side of the question of wanting to give face to or give voice to the the the men behind the image. And her findings from this was that they were predominantly had had performances of heteronormative masculinity and also instances of sincere gender play. So my first finding is that social VR embodies new media logics that produce ambiguous socio-technical links between the avatar and virtual world. The main point here is to think about how the new media logics of immediacy and hyper-mediacy are in tension. Social VR embodies this paradox in a way that masks how it operates. The bodily affect of immersion from VR aims to erase the medium through realism while this avatars and VR platform itself makes it known that it's VR chat virtual reality or the metaverse as they sell people self-reflexively call the VR chat world. It is embodied in a way that the avatar and socio-technical system are linked at an inherent level. And so these are kind of three examples that show that inherent link between the avatar and socio-technical system. One is that blocking users show that despite the guys of immediacy of a shared space, not all users see or hear the same things. You can block users or change the settings. And the reality is that not everyone has seen the same thing even if they're together. Secondly, the avatar performance ranking exemplifies how it's a metric in which not the complex avatars are not necessarily the better ones, but avatars are kind of valued by how it democratizes communication with the bandwidth with everyone else in the room. And another example is seen in avatar worlds or the proliferation and predominance of the anime girl aesthetic seen in VR chat. It really provokes the question of why and is asking people this question, I'll often get a response at oh, it's the easiest style of avatar to make or there are no good male anime avatars that I can choose from. So these kinds of reasons I think is what this thesis aims to challenge. So one of my auto ethnographic experiences stick out to me. So I was invited to a concert of a French musician by a publicist I met at Sundance. And so once I got there, I felt the excitement crowds of avatars waiting, but around 40 minutes in, there was no show. After repeated technical difficulties combined with people getting frustrated, someone in a Hatsune Miku avatar ran to the front of the stage and started dancing in front of everyone to the laughter and encouragement of some male users. Afterwards I asked about it and the guy said it was just I was just clicking the emote button and I didn't make this myself, almost as a disclaimer. The emote button is so impersonal and detached, yet as a viewer that situation didn't really feel that way. Of course it's the anime girl in a short skirt who placates the crowd. In this act, the avatarization of anime girls reflects stereotypes about Asian femininity and bodily labor. The digital avatar itself and what is coded in it produced an affect. Like the guy said, he only clicked a button. So I want to think more about the anime girl avatar as a material object and as an assemblage of signs. Avatarizing desire, even if it is not the user's own, it is a symbol that reproduces cultural hegemony. Finding to the aesthetics and technical structures of MMD based models are tied to values that reproduce tropes about Asian femme bodies. This is known but not interrogated although it affects social culture. So by analyzing the data structure, I was able to trace the movement and history across media platforms. The MMD model is a 3D model that originated from the fan culture surrounding Hatsume Miku who is a vocal software, virtual singer and anime figure who transcends multiple media forms. Using the freeware MMD software, which stands for Miku Miku Dance, fans could animate Miku's bodies into different dance moves and upload it. Released in 2008, the software is one of the earliest that allows complex joints and physics systems for humanoid avatar bodies. For this reason, it has been used to make music videos, crowd-source choreography for concerts, user-generated pornography, and now in part VR chat avatars. Learning tutorials for how to make VR chat avatar from MMD model share more than just the technical knowledge but also the makers attitudes towards their avatar and its imagery. Specifications of value preferences in dampening, elasticity, stiffness, etc. express the desire to port control through technical mastery of particular body parts. Humors also often used to reinforce this. Post-packs are pre-made gestures that animate the avatars and orient the possibilities for their avatar's actions which include play and touch of body parts or the flowing movements of long hair. Moreover, MMD-based avatars rely on pre-existing media infrastructures such as repositories of user-made models such as on Nikoni Solid. There are a lot of freelance artists, hobbyists, devoted fans who built up this open and participatory culture and it's really quite incredible. So in many cases the act of building an avatar from scratch contributes to the feeling of ownership and identification with it but culture works algorithmically and the stereotypical features of these media representations carry on to the space in subversive ways. I've used a Shoujo school girl avatar once to go through this process and only in VRChat did I realize that when moving around people could see up its skirt. In a way the claim that the MMD is the most convenient and easy yes avatar is partly true here but there's there's more to it. So thinking beyond the anime girl, a phrase used by English speakers of VRC, let's consider the concept of Shoujo and be Shoujo more broadly. So Shoujo is a term that means a Japanese term that means girl or young woman and typically refers to the audience of Shoujo manga so adolescent girls who are the drivers of these culture. The imagery of the Shoujo figure across East Asian cultures and consumable culture reify notions of Asian film femininity the pure virginal maiden who is simultaneously sexually empowered. Like VRC space the spectacle of mixed signs and interpretations the transnational media scape of Shoujo are also complexly intertwined. In Anne Allison's study of Japanese toys she articulates how the material production of media are tied with and global fantasies. As Tomiko Yoda says of girl culture in Japan objects are immersed in a mediatic ambiance blurring the distinction between the manufactured product itself and its distribution and promotion. According to Tomiko Yoda the history of girls magazines reflect a transformative point between girl and woman becoming a woman is a transformation with no return with little residue. It is a fundamental paradox of girl culture that this erasing transformation is accompanied by elaboration of the intricately pleasurable practices of being a girl becoming a girl. If we think back to my earlier anecdote about the dancing Hatsune Miku my affective relation towards Shoujo imagery you know we have Sailor Moon here who is an incredibly empowering figure young girls identify with being used in contexts outside of that. Shoujo imagery though has aesthetic continuities with Bishoujo which translates to beautiful girl and shifts men as primary consumers of its artifacts and is used as a figure in adult dating games or in idol figures like Miku. So Shoujo are not only objects of affection they are active agents of stories which many young people identify with and understanding the affective complexity toward the Shoujo aesthetic depends on your global position and experience with media representation. The proliferation of this ambiguous imagery transgressing public and private spaces reproduces damaging phantasms in virtual and media-tized worlds. As Shoujo Hatsune Miku symbolizes a fluidity of meanings attached to media and the different material forms and lives it can take. So here we see a hologram of Miku selling out concerts a man in Japan also has married a hologram of Miku. So how can we describe this phenomenon? Hatsune Miku's fan-based include Otaku who are young media savvy hardcore fans of anime manga video games and came out from the rapid technological advancements in the 80s in Japan. Moe is a term that describes a euphoric response to an intimacy with these fantasy characters and the representations of them. Moe is an affect in response to fantasy forms and typically describe a burning passion for these young cute anime girls. Digital media scholars consider Hatsune Miku fan practices as democratized participatory culture of web 2.0. Some theorists consider Otaku as more open to other possibilities of becoming a union between man and machine a new god that transcendent relation to the technological bodies or a heroin interpretation of a contemporary cyborg. But what does it mean for a vision for online participation or a vision for post human subjectivity to be shoujo a mediatized girl from Japan? I argue that the idea of the anime girl being post-racial is a myth. Shoujo is situated in cultural representation of Asian femininity and continue to hold affective relationships with young girls that I argue should be the active agents of its aesthetic, mediatized or not. Especially as we are entering an increasingly mediatized and virtualized world, the avatarization of desire needs to be defined as such. Moreover, global nature of anime requires us to revisit this aesthetic and its potential implications across global audiences. So another point of discussion is the global export of Asian femininity and quite literally of women themselves. In the Cool Japan campaign is the Cool Japan campaign is part of the Japanese foreign ministry's brand strategy to export its media and commercial products abroad while inviting tourism. Here you see Kizuna AI, another figure like Hatsune Miku well known as a virtual YouTuber reaching out saying come to Japan in front of a natural landscape. This type of imagery reinforce ideas of Japan and Japanese women as a site for exploration. Here we have the three ambassadors of cute from 2009 reflecting tropes about Asian women propagated by the national Japanese government themselves. The school girl Lolita, the Harajuku style girl certainly all discourses related to Shoujo. These girls visit various countries promoting popular culture. So when we think about techno orientalism in VR chat, it's critical to consider the economic and social history of mediatized girls through the lens of advertising and the export of these images. Techno Orientalism is not only a question of West versus East, which by the way is often used synonymously with a single country of Japan. Rather techno Orientalism is a question of global imperialism and which power is in motion across national ethnic and racial lines. So a key insight coming out from here is that we need more feminist design of digital avatars to reveal the racial and gendered power dynamics in virtual world making. Social VR however does offer possibilities for sincere expression, identity, expression and play. There's been many uses for rehabilitative purposes for addiction or treating mental health for instance as psychology research has shown. Automagirl avatars are also used by a femme trans femme identified folks who might be experimenting with gender expression. There's a club zodiac on the right here. It's another instance. Club zodiac is a pole dancing community that uses full body tracking to perform in front of VRC audiences. While the anime style aesthetic is used, the modifications made expressed user agency in the adjustments to body types or skin tones were over the use of full body tracking to dance strengthens the continuities between the actions of the avatar and that of the user unlike the emote button we discussed earlier. Social VR offers possibilities for bridging geographical barriers for a shared experience. Here's a still from the immersive theater performance scarecrow VR chat. When I asked which from a production crew in Korea when I asked the interlocutor of mine how much of this audience here is from a film festival and from the VR chat community and they said about half half we all shared this moment through K-Arts creative performance. So I now move into my more creative work. As Doreen Kondo writes, creativity is work, practice method, a site of theory making and political intervention. So here we have the shoujo ghost. And the shoujo ghost to me is a character concept that's still in progress. But as my talk has covered the materiality of digital avatars hold agencies separately from that of the user. The shoujo ghost is an expression of this agency in the form grounded in memory. The story of the avatarized anime girl. The shoujo ghost creates a memory of this phenomenon in social VR in a way that informs future world making from the point of view of animus mythologies. My concept of the shoujo ghost is largely inspired by the legend of Heshin-dang who is a virgin ghost spirit and sea spirit in a fishing village in Jeju-do Korea. As the legend goes, Heshin-dang is a young maiden whose fiancee left her on a rock while he was going to fish. She got washed over the shore and passed away. Her virgin spirit, not having fulfilled her womanly purpose, raged over the village. And to appease her spirit, the villagers would erect phallic statues around her shrine. The shoujo ghost is a play on the virgin ghost, but also a re-stratification of this idea. She is the spirit of the avatarized anime girl in VR chat, long divorced from their origin. The shoujo ghost yearns for techno intimacy and is satiated only by rituals of heteronormative sexuality in VR chat. Thus, her form as ghost actually is her most pronounced expression of agency within this condition and must be exercised in order to reimagine virtual worlds. So to give some more clarity here, I introduced the idea of cyber shamanic performance. So cyber shamanic performance is really centered on the idea of expanding notions of virtual world-making through practices that are rooted in embodying and enacting memory, centering voices in the margins. Shamanism is incredibly broad and contested term and is practiced across culture with regional differences. By cyber shamanic performance, I'm referring primarily to shamanic practice in Korea and its interrelationships to media technologies that correspond with its specific modern history. Shamans or mudang are predominantly women who are conceived of as carriers of stories of trauma through Korea's modern history. As healers, priests, performance, and profits, shamans revive gaps and emissions and cultural memory through practices of remembrance. In the Buryat context in Mongolia, Manduhae Boyan Delger theorizes shamanic performances as enacted memories realized through multiple media such as gesture, language, food, music, and material objects. So shamanism in Korea has ties to media technologies. Then this documentary recreation of the life of the Korean Wudang Kim, the young girl is collecting scrap metal from her village to sponsor the artifacts for her initiation ritual to become a shaman. We see here the self-reflexive inclusion of the film crew and placing the camera into the bag as one of the tools signifying this union between technologies of virtuality and gestures of goodwill towards towards their use and Saisha is a contemporary work by Hyunji Kim where that allows you to is an exploration. This artist uses cyber shamanic performance to explore diasporic identity. The ultimate work of shamans in reconstituting the past is not history but memory, knowledge of the past that is emotionalized, embodied, and attached to an individual. This brings us back to a place of care, currently a work in progress. There are a lot of values that we can draw from cyber shamanic performance, one of them being an emphasis on healing. A place of care brings you into the massage room. It's a place to consider the lives lost to senseless gun violence and it's also a place to consider the systemic, the dynamics of police violence and transnational histories of Asian woman body labor. As Asian massage workers, sex workers, and survivors of human trafficking continue to be impacted by anti-migration policing and the criminalization of their livelihoods. A place of care invites us to consider the implications of damaging cultural fantasms about Asian femininity virtually but also three blocks down to add our local Asian massage business. In this work I draw from popular storytelling practices pairing with 360 video of this happening down here which is a shamanic dance to resolve sorrow and transform the pain into reality, a pain of reality into beauty and concludes with all participants joining together collectively near an ocean shore landscape. So as a brief conclusion today I examined the cultural production of the anime girl avatar in VR chat to understand socio-technical relations to virtual world-making. I deconstructed cultural biases in social VR, explored the potential of this as a site for performing identity and ultimately argued that being anime is not a post-racial category but one built from a very specific and situated cultural history. And so in terms of future work I'll be doing a Fulbright Fellowship in South Korea and my research project is to investigate how historical archives, folk storytelling and cultural memory could be a more central part to virtual world-making. I'm curious about how virtual technologies can be used for creative educational curricula and how digital performances can be a research method or a mode of inquiry. So thank you so much for listening to my presentation and I'll stop sharing this screen now. Great. Thanks so much, Andrea. So we're open for questions. William. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Andrea. It's really provocative and big. And always hearing about your work always makes my mind like explode a little bit and I'm afraid I have kind of a question that reveals more about my ignorance than anything else. So Hatsune Miku as you rightly said gets usually emblazoned with words like democratization, web 2.0, this is a contributory, fan-based. I don't know the empirical work behind it in terms of gender divide, like who makes it and who doesn't. Is it an exclusively male fantasy or are women involved with that? But my question actually connects with your point about the shaman and this notion of memory versus history. And I get the critique if Miku is kind of history, if it's out there. But it strikes me that it is emotionalized. It is embodied. It is attached to individuals to the extent that people contribute to it. That contributory dimension complicates that character in my mind anyway. So for example, the work on queering of Miku, right? For a particular community, that is a very personal kind of assertion. It's an embodied assertion. They've taken the time to work on the drawing themselves. And I'm just wondering how that works. Like this divide between history and memory is an intriguing one. It's the shamanic dimension that you mentioned at the end. Doesn't Miku slide in and out of that between being out there and being part of us who produce it, those who produce it? Because it is emotional investment. It is an embodied act. Yeah, I guess that's my question. I'm struck by the, for me, and this is ignorance as much as anything, the kind of ambivalence of that figure. Yeah, that's my question. Yeah, I think this is partly where my situated approach comes in, because there's a lot I can read about Hatsune Miku being a symbol for this or a symbol for that. But I think at the end of the day, the approach that I've chosen and thinking about the specific imageries that Hatsune Miku or the way that avatar was used in the anecdote that I shared, I think is the center point of this discussion about what she could represent as a virtual idol. And so I would have to look into exactly the gender distribution for who is her fan base. But from the readings that I've had, it is largely driven by the otaku male fan base. And I think that, yeah. But it's less the fan base, because I know there are definitely a lot of fans. It's more the creative base. It's the place that she comes from. It's the hands that generate her figure. And it's the hands that manipulate that figure, fair enough to take an instance. But there is, let's say I haven't read much about it, but what I have read is on the queering of the character, which is a really interesting, again, not just fans, but creators. So it's that polyphonic notion of creativity that to me helps this character straddle the history memory thing is a nice way to talk about it. That this is embodied memory for some people, those who have contributed to making it. Whereas for others, yeah, it's just a thing to look at like we look at history. We're outsiders and we look at this distant artifact. But okay, that's fair answer. Well, I have another historical question. And that is just the what are the origins and again, what are the origins of the original two dimensional form of the anime girl. And, you know, what I guess I'm thinking about Stuart Hall's concept of the historical conjuncture, right, and what, you know, what were the various kind of historical forces at play in the creation of that particular figure. And, you know, how does that how does that differ from the present moment or the moment where where the anime girl form becomes animated into three dimensions in VR worlds. And so I'm just curious about the relationship between the origins of the figure in two dimensions and the kind of moment that you're looking at in your work. Right, so I in terms of tracing origins of I guess the shoujo aesthetic, I read about kind of girl magazines in Japan and Tamiko Yodo's work discussed how in girl. So I guess like I was trying to I was trying to bring in these themes from girls magazines in the history of kind of like media for for for young girls to to express like a 10, like a thematic tension like for instance, becoming woman is transformative with no return and little residue yet it's and it's a fundamental paradox of girl culture that erases this transformation. Yeah, so I guess I'm I'm if I think looking at the history of shoujo will will say that it is the audience of it is actually towards shoujo young girls themselves and in the form of girl magazines. Paul, I have a question to if I don't know if they're I can't see if they're hands too. Paul had his hand up. Okay, so why don't we go Paul and then Fox. Okay, my hands blending in with the wall. Thanks, Andrea, that was great to see sort of how you brought all these things that we've been talking about sort of together was really nice to and I really appreciated how you brought in the context of massage and care and that that's what I wanted to ask more about. It's always been striking hearing men talk about why they're using anime girl avatars and VR in that it's often seems to have a aspect of care or relaxation or they say it's very easy to have people talk to you because you look a certain way, or there's a kind of soothing quality, not confrontational quality, which of course as you describe is completely over determined and racialized and and has a lot of context around it but at the same time it's often precisely along these lines of care or affective labor or a certain kind of emotional association with the form that comes through. So I was wondering if you could maybe elaborate a little bit on this larger context you're drawing out of if the the anime girl avatar is actually a tool of care in some context or could actually play a role on the same kind of affective or restorative level but then you're also drawing out this other context with the performance of the the the space of a massage and also the kind of shamanic ritual space as well. I was wondering if you could kind of yeah where where the avatar fits into this question of care and care work. Yeah thank you I think um yeah um in terms of like you know the is emotional affects and feelings of care towards these sort like moe and towards anime girls I think that's totally you know it's certainly an expression of care so yes I would completely agree with that but I think a question comes like towards you know what happens when these types of visions for care um you know in VR chat through the anime girl it doesn't feel accessible to other people who might have like reactions against that aesthetic so I think like my project is really speaking towards the need you know looking at these phenomenons um in embodying embodying different anime characters um like I mentioned you know the possibilities for gender play using these anime characters or you know other instantiations of user agency and empowerment but um yeah so but I guess like my project is is searching for kind of alternative visions as well to that are like inspired I guess by you know these instantiations of virtual personhood which are instead like they are certainly virtual virtual personhood um but are you know made in spaces of exclusions to Fox yeah sure so I want to just ask Andrea just if we could explore a little bit more about this the idea that you know say the you know the anime girl character could you know can be sort of re-appropriated by communities for empowering or even transgressive kind of purposes versus it seems like a lot of what you're arguing about is that there is still a kind of resonant violence that is often done especially for you know a lot of Asian female users within the space and what it makes me think of you know so there was a paper in a MIT press book written by Simon Penney the robotics artist and a professor where he describes one exhibition that he you know he you know mentions as unfortunate and ill-conceived and so the way he describes it and I'll say there's a mistake in the way he describes it I'll mention it in a second but he describes it as a work called Can Xuan by Alexander Brandt and it's an interactive work in which there is an Asian woman who is nude lying face up projected onto a life-size crumpled crop cloth on the stone floor in the dark corner and the only thing users can do in this interactive exhibition is to stomp on this projection and it's interactive in the sense that she will then recoil in pain and so forth and eventually even fade away so you know he critiques it as being a work that's created by a white male and something that is you know it's a work that is seen as oppressive and like based in colonial fantasies and much more actually there was a mistake in his analysis Ken Xuan it was the artist who is Asian female artist and Alexander Brandt was the curator or gallery owner and so there was a misreading that was there but I think it's telling because still the resonance you know regardless of the fact that there was a kind of reappropriation of her own image within the work it was still read in this kind of you know in this kind of oppressive way and it seems to be related to what you're saying that if people just want to take up an image that has some kind of you know violent resonance or connects to those histories even if for them it feels somehow kind of redemptive or empowering in the world it might not be because somebody else going to the gallery wouldn't feel what the artist felt when she created that work and it seems to me that's where the kind of the kind of insights of mandu high and and your work are important that it's not enough just to take up the avatar and then within your sub community to use that as some kind of empowerment work the shamanic practice seems like it's doing the additional work thinking through what really has to happen in order for it to be transformative in a broader sense for other visitors in the space and yeah and and not just to kind of an internal one and so that's yeah in some sense yeah commentary but I also wonder if that resonates with how you are seeing the shamanic work is sort of going beyond just communities reappropriating imagery but trying to make sure that it actually does the work that they intend to more broadly right I think thank you so much for that comment fox I think um yeah I think my work once is responding to the fact of exclusions in virtual personhood and it's it's to me I think that alone is an argument against why it is a form of virtual personhood and we have to consider kind of like the you know more popularized I guess more truly democratized form of virtual personhood I argue looks would look different and so yeah and I and with the shamanic practices being rooted in giving voice to more like marginalized experiences or you know being a carrier of popular knowledges and stories I think yeah that resonates there's one more question before we move on in in the chat that is from Diane Kim congratulations on the full bright Andrea I would love to learn more about how you want to carry out the project in Korea what are some topics you're excited to explore yeah so I've been really loving kind of digital media performance using social VR so I'd be curious to think more about how social VR can be used and for theater or in you know and I would love a part of my work in full right involves ethnographic work in different like mask dance mask dance traditions and so I think it could be interesting to think about how like ritual objects are built or like artistic objects are built that have a more like ritualistic history and think about how that relationship to materials can be used in the virtual reality context as well so coming up with new design principles that are more rooted in like like performance practices like mask dances and how like the the costumes or objects are prepared excuse me thank you so much Andrea and have another round of applause wonderful work