Call for Papers:
Creating Second Lives 2011: Crossing Boundaries
September 8th & 9th 2011
School of Creative Studies and Media, Bangor University
Conveners: Dr Eben J. Muse and Dr Astrid Ensslin
Submission deadline: 30 April 2011
The Creating Second Lives conference is a chance to explore lives lived in virtual worlds, electronic games, MMORPG and other parts of cyberspace. Following Creating Second Lives 2008: Reading and Writing Virtual Communities, the theme of Creating Second Lives 2011 is the blurring of boundaries in the mixed reality of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality. New technologies are moving users into the screen (Microsoft’s Kinect), making the user the screen (MIT’s Sixth Sense), and bringing the content out of the screen into the world (smart-phones, Layars, Wikitude). Pervasive games, Digital tourism, telematic art and telematic performance are only a few manifestations of this new set of boundaries that must alter our definitions of fundamental concepts of culture, gender, identity, race, nation, authority, geography, space, narrative and time. The distinction between second life and first life is blurring at an increasingly rapid rate.
We invite proposals for twenty minute papers that examine how people are using these technologies to cross boundaries (technical, spatial, temporal, cultural, social, political, linguistic, ludic, economic) through a range of theoretical and applied, empirical, critical, rhetorical, creative, economic and professional approaches.
Conference papers will be considered for subsequent publication in a special, themed issue of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds.
Please e-mail abstracts of 250-300 words to e.muse@bangor.ac.uk along with your name, affiliation and title of paper. All queries should also be directed to this address. Please include in your proposal any technological needs.
The deadline for submission is 31st April 2011. Selection of papers will be made by 15th May.
Further information concerning the conference will soon be announced on our website:
http://sites.google.com/site/csl20110908/