04

Virtual Bodies: Cyborgs, Machinima, and a Phenomenology of Dissonance HARRISON WADE

Donna Haraway calls her influential essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a myth “about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities, which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (14). Haraway points out that if the cyborg is now popular, it is for the former qualities of its possibilities and not the political work needed to make those possibilities actual. Te cyborg often exists to entrench the dichotomies Haraway set out to dismantle between person and animal, mind and body, idealism and materialism. For Haraway, the cyborg is a figure of contemporary being. Te cyborg already exists within our global system of information and domination,

63 and her potential, particularly for women of colour, is to reclaim the already transgressed boundaries of our bodies. Tus, Haraway writes that a cyborg “is not innocent … it does not seek unitary identity and so generates antagonistic dualisms without end … Te machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (65). Te myth of “A Cyborg Manifesto” is a story about how the cyborg denaturalizes the antagonistic dualisms of our society and our stories. It is writing against writing. Te cyborg lets us escape myths of unitary subjectivity, because she is always incomplete and indeterminate. Her writing, “cyborg writing,” is “about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools” to remake the representations that have excluded the author (55). Tis writing is appropriation and change; it makes the mutability of systems of power visible and accessible, such that their representational power is laid bare. Cyborg writing, showing “how fundamental body imagery is to worldview, and so to political language,” changes reality by marking it as incomplete (53). To write away from a unifying subjectivity and towards an incomplete body challenges conventional acts of writing and beliefs in the power of writing. Machinima are a form of cyborg writing. As an aesthetic practice, they are inherently feminist along Haraway’s line of thought by treating representations of bodies as always incomplete, mutable, and transgressive. Moreover, their media specificity, as movies made in video game and computer graphics engines, not only highlights the indeterminacy of contemporary media but also of the self. Tey are myths against myths, stories that undo oppositional binaries, showing how the human is also the computer, and the mind is also the body. In this way, machinima alert us to the ways that our bodies are conditioned by contemporary media, alongside our cognitive processes and perception. Like the cyborg, machinima are never innocent. Tey present a double front of embodiment and conditioning—as objects that are both and neither cinema and video games. Te

64 machinima I will analyze here are feminist artworks explicitly working through representations of the female body made by contemporary female artists. Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet (2001) and Skawennati’s She Falls for Ages (2017) offer two distinct examples of what machinima can accomplish as feminist, cyborg texts. While the former highlights the instability of self and the latter presents a relatively unified narrative, I will argue that both machinima generate meaning through a formal and sensational aesthetics of dissonance. I will use phenomenology and affect theory to make sense of how I move with these movies. Both theories undo modernist hierarchies that privilege cognition over sensation and mind over body, taking up the political, feminist work Haraway outlines. Tis work means never arriving at something complete, never returning to a unifying theory of embodiment. Tis unstable embodiment pays attention to how I can be pulled in opposing directions at once and how media mediate how I interact with my body. It is not pure; there is no natural embodiment. Placing myself into a world always conditions my sensations, whether that world is a movie, video game, or machinima. Considering how I am conditioned resists my turning away from cognition. I will argue that these machinima achieve a political incompleteness in how they are never quite video games or movies, never totally critical or celebratory. In this incompleteness, these machinima demand that I split my subjectivity and modify my being, such that when I feel, I think, and when I think, I feel. Machinima largely escape the dichotomy of thinking and feeling by showing how virtual cognition can become embodied feeling. Tis can be seen in She Puppet, which develops dissonance between how a video game demands thought in navigating space and a movie that places the avatar in a realm of affective spectator experience. While the machinima I am interested in are part of an art world circuit (I first saw She Falls for Ages as an installation), most machinima are both artisanal and populist. Tis ambivalence is unavoidable. Produced with computer graphics engines, machinima depend on existing software, hardware, and

65 intellectual property. Tus, while there are plenty of machinima that, like She Puppet, critically interrogate the representational and computational limitations of their media, it would be remiss of me not to point to the fact that machinima are also, inevitably, advertisements. As a form of expression, machinima are a form of fan labour, existing alongside video essays and fan fiction. Popular machinima, like Red vs. Blue, a series based off the video game franchise Halo and distributed on YouTube, plays down its feminist dissonance by incorporating existing game mechanics into a narrative structure borrowed from the televised sitcom. Red vs. Blue achieved such a level of success that it was supported by Bungie, a subsidiary of Microsoft and the developer of the Halo series at the time (Tompson 25). Tis support was both financial and environmental. Bungie, in fact, developed later games with in-game support for machinima animators. While this is a marginal, exemplary case of machinima becoming accepted and incorporated into game production, watching She Puppet and She Falls for Ages makes me want to play Tomb Raider and Second Life. I feel an itch in my fingers to play and create. Because most machinima exist in an artisanal circuit of forums and blogs and low-count YouTube videos, they inspire me to see what I could create. Unlike the polish of Red vs. Blue episodes, the dissonance of most machinima—between reality and the virtual, or what people might do and the limitations of the system—produces an affective response that points to the form’s feminist and democratic potential. We should remember that this is cyborg writing because it appropriates, steals, and makes production “equipment” accessible. Phenomenology lets us start working through the feeling of watching machinima, thus the awareness of being a cyborg. Phenomenology is, broadly, the study of phenomena. Specifically, it is the examination of our experience itself, and what perceptions go into our experience to generate meaning. As such, using phenomenology provides helpful vocabulary, particularly in expressing how I feel with the characters in She Puppet and She Falls for Ages, but lacks the language, as of yet, to speak to the itch in my fingers, the

66 sensation of my virtual flesh. Vivian Sobchack’s seminal essay, “What My Fingers Knew,” uses phenomenology to make sense of the body as site of reciprocal, carnal spectatorship that transgresses the dichotomies of subject and object, spectator and screen. Like Haraway, Sobchack attempts to allow for a sustained indeterminacy. She connects oppositional terms to figure the body as “both carnal and conscious, sensible and sentient” (83). If, at other points, she ends up privileging the former, this is perhaps a result of her work responding to earlier film theory that only privileged the latter. Tus, when she writes, “the cinesthetic subject both touches and is touched by the screen—able to commute seeing to touching and back again without a thought,” affect undoes the thinking subject (71). Sensation, as sight and touch, is privileged over thought. Despite this, Sobchack’s essay offers a transgressive and illuminating cyborg figure in her description of the body as a third term in the cinematic encounter. Usually cinema is theorized in two terms, the sensuousness of the screen, with its attending technologies, and the receptivity of the spectator, with her psychoanalytic unconscious and base perceptions. In suggesting the body as a third term, Sobchack does not mean to simply introduce a third, distinct concept, but means to disrupt the dichotomy of the other two. Te third term is a recognition that sensation moves in varying degrees between the two and is conditioned by the body. As Sobchack writes:

“My lived body … subverts the very notion of onscreen and ofscreen as mutually exclusive sites or subject positions. Indeed, much of the ‘pleasure of the text’ emerges from this carnal subversion of fixed subject positions, from the body as a ‘third’ term that both exceeds and yet is within discrete representation.” (67)

Tis body has apparent ties to machinima, although it demands we qualify Sobchack’s formulation. Not only do machinima involve the body as a third term, as a form of cinema, they also offer sensation tied to the experience of playing video games.

67 With machinima, I can never quite escape the difference between onscreen and offscreen as exclusive sites. Onscreen, I am experiencing the media object as a spectator, but offscreen my fingers have the urge to take hold of the avatar through a game controller. For Sobchack, cinema is subversive because the spectator identifies and feels with the characters, escaping their body. Tere is indeed a degree of subversion with machinima, as I identify and feel with Lara Croft in She Puppet or Otsitsakaion in She Falls for Ages as characters. But there is also a pleasure in simultaneously feeling with them as avatars. As avatars, they do not let me escape my body and instead return me to it. I know the tactile connection of moving avatars with video game controllers. What my fingers know is not only what the characters sense but also what the animator feels moving these avatars within the boundaries of the video game system. Tis sensation of touch derives from a history of playing video games, though not these games in particular. Contextualizing the turn in film theory from “visual qualities and intelligible effects” to “sensory impact,” Elizabeth Stephens critiques the loss of historical specificity in Sobchack and others’ feminist phenomenology (530). Te existential phenomenology Sobchack adopts is a framework for understanding how the body is involved in perception and generating meaning. Te feminist theoretical inflection is a turn to the body, away from the visual, in an attempt to destabilize dominant film theory. Stephens positions her essay as an extension of this feminist work. She praises how phenomenology “[draws] attention to the importance of the history and philosophy of the training of the senses to even our most intense physical reactions” (531). What she takes issue with is that “when these theorists move from a consideration of the visual to the tactile … this shift represents a turn from the critical to the celebratory” (533). Te important historical and cultural work of phenomenology exists only in its critique of ocularcentrism. While I would qualify Stephens’ critique by pointing to the beginning of “What My Fingers Knew,” which draws attention to early film theory’s interest in

68 the carnal (Sobchack 55), we can see the veracity of her critique in the block quote above. Sobchack positions the lived body as third term as “subversive” to existing subject positions and forms of knowledge. What she fails to recognize, according to Stephens, is the historical and ongoing construction of the lived body itself. Stephens’ historical specificity helps explain the complex phenomenological pleasure of watching machinima. As Stephens says: “Our sensual response to film, just like our viewing practices, are not spontaneous or unmediated but rather a part of the sensory training in which the technology of cinema itself instructs us” (534). She points to strains of experimental and exploitation film that not only teach us to feel in certain ways but privileges those feelings. Machinima adopt this training as they adopt cinematic conventions, but also involve the sensory training of another form. Te body of the video game player is conditioned, for example, to restricted movement defined by controller configurations and system rules. Stephens’ encourages us to remember this conditioning when turning to the body, reminding us that our bodies are conditioned by the history of its medium. Tis conditioning shapes (though does not determine) our bodily experience of viewing. Machinima’s hybridity, then, generates two distinct, but related, viewing and playing practices. Tey are pleasurable as media objects because the viewer is physically conditioned by cinema and video games, but they also represent ways of playing against that conditioning. Unlike Sobchack’s body, which seems wholly subversive, Stephens argues “the line between cultural rules—or technologies of power— and self-making—or techniques of the self—is not a hard and fast one” (536). Te third term, the lived body, might seem to exist outside of cultural norms only in relation to film theory’s earlier privileging of cognition and sight. Te cyborg’s body is not innocent but is as constructed as its mind. Because machinima train sensation doubly, in movies and video games, we can develop this history of sensation by turning first, to perception and cinema, and second, to affect theory and video games. With respect to the history of perception and

69 cinema, Scott Richmond offers a solution to Stephens’ critique in Cinema’s Bodily Illusions. Richmond suggests that cinema, as an apparatus, has always been about the modification of perception. It is always about the cyborg, the third figure, but for Richmond, the indeterminacy points us back to the pleasures of our own bodies. Because “illusion indexes any departure from the regular covariation of information in ordinary perception … Illusion is endemic to the cinema” (Richmond 84). At the cinema, every image is an illusion because I am aware at a sensational level of the perceptual dissonance between my sight and the sight on the screen. Tis does not mean I am not moved by the screen. Rather, because all cinema is illusion, I am moved by animation as well as what we can relatively call reality. Te pleasure of the cinema, for Richmond is how it “inevitably modulates [his] self-sensitivity” and constructs a subjectivity outside the bounds of his own perception (130). By bearing perceptual faith to the illusion he is moved and constructed, as Stephens suggests, by illusions on screen. Te cinema, as conventionally understood as an enormous screen and darkened theatre, has always offered images too big and too well-organized to be real, and these illusions have conditioned us. Machinima, as cinema, theoretically demands that I modify my subjectivity to bear perceptual faith to their illusion. And yet, machinima are not presented in a darkened theatre space but produced, distributed, and viewed on computers. While it is not my goal here to provide a phenomenology of the laptop screen, I want to argue that machinima never let me bear total faith in their illusion. As such, my self-sensitivity and perception is never totally modulated. Tis incomplete perception, which by now should be the familiar figure of the cyborg, is a result of my laptop’s physicality in the world and the machinima’s dependency on video games. Unlike the apparatus of the cinema, the laptop screen is always grounded in a perceptual reality, and if I am watching She Puppet in a window, the movie is grounded in another layer of virtual perception. Which is to say, as long as I watch machinima as they are conventionally distributed, illusion is never total. I might hear my landlord’s baby crying or my

70 cat might walk across my keyboard (possibly closing the video player). Moreover, one of the pleasures of watching machinima is recognizing the work that goes into this form of cyborg writing. Tere is a sense of surprise and appreciation that comes from watching a player make avatars do something unique, interesting, or exceptional. Tis pleasure is distinct from animation and has to do our cultural and historical appreciation of video games as sensuous, sometimes challenging objects. Using affect and queer theory, Aubrey Anable suggests that the ability to touch games disrupts subject-object and affect-cognition dichotomies. It is this lack of touch, ironically, that is always felt when I watch machinima. With Anable, we again return to the cyborg. Te body, for Anable as well as for the cyborg, is not just representation but also affect. For her, video games act as a “contemporary site through which to address the longer history of how bodies are mediated, how their mediation informs shifting notions of what ‘the body’ is, and which bodies come to matter” (132). Tis interest in the mediation of bodies develops from our newly historicized appreciation of sensation in the cinema as capable of constructing and constituting subjectivity. Video games adopt and change the way our bodies come to mean through media. Anable discovers representation and affect on the surface of video games, on their screens. Affect and cognition, just as representation and code, “are completely intertwined. Tis entanglement can really be grasped only through mediation, the interface that permits one system to inform and shape the other” (56). Because the player only has access to code through the mediation of the screen, code as cognition is only literally available through the affective process of playing. Touching a video game brings me in contact with its code, intertwining my sensation with its digital base. Trough the screen, touching “creates an affective assemblage that involves the player’s body and its sensual capacities, and the code of the game” (38). As I touch a screen, or press buttons on a controller, or move a mouse, I encounter the code of a game or software. And as I watch a machinima, I meet the screen and

71 encounter the character but also encounter the creator in the process of encountering the code of the game. My fingers itch to feel the virtual world and to play. I am embodied in a number of worlds, a cyborg meeting another cyborg. Te opening moments of Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet dramatize this embodied encounter. Lara Croft transitions from avatar to character as I transition from player to spectator, feeling with Croft. I first see Croft in close-up. She wears a parka and stands apart from an icy wall, her breath fogging. A voice-over speaks: “Why did they give me a kingdom to rule over if there is no better kingdom than this hour, in which I exist between what I was not and what I will not be.” As she begins the level, I see her as an avatar, feel her through a control stick, a finger on the controller’s trigger. She shoots men and guard dogs, runs through a tunnel from one area to another. But then she stops shooting back. A dying enemy shoots her, a dog jumps and bites. She lets herself die and I no longer feel the controller. She has become a character to me and I watch her as a spectator. Tis death begins a forty-second sequence of Croft dying repeatedly in different environments. She is shot, burned, drowned, etc., but each time she dies in the exact same way. Death is boring to a player, but as I begin to feel with Croft, it begins to feel impossibly transcendental. Each time she dies, she comes back to a space between what she was not and what she will not be, between the last life and the next death. As she respawns, she is a new avatar, only to die again. Croft is simultaneously a character and an avatar; she exists in a puddle of affects that I cannot cleanly place into a binary. To feel that with her is the affective potential of She Puppet. Ahwesh’s machinima is an example of disruptive cyborg writing. She Puppet offers an aesthetics of dissonance, asking me to encounter it cognitively and affectively at the same time. Dissonance is the recognition of difference between two things and the very feeling of that difference. With She Puppet, that dissonance exists between a critique of Croft’s sexualized body and a possibility of sensational transcendence, escape. If early

72 feminist film theory was concerned with the former and feminist phenomenology, the latter, my essay is arguing that both are possible at once. In fact, we can think representation by feeling system limitations and can feel transcendence by thinking the game’s mediation. Te Latin origin of transcendence is transcendere, which means to climb over or surmount. Transcendence is the climbing over of our conditioned embodiment to reach a new realm of possibilities. Transcendence in this case is the surmounting of the binary between physical and virtual, affect and cognition. Instead of closing off possibilities of sensation in the virtual world because it is a “disjuncture between the spectator’s lived body and cinematic representation” (Sobchack 74)1, it is important to learn how to feel virtually. Following Haraway’s cyborg myth, we are all cyborgs, incomplete and indeterminate beings, as any body (every body) who has become attached to their phone or computer can confirm. Half-attached to the screen, half-feeling through Lara Croft, I am becoming a cyborg. Like Haraway’s cyborg, I am not born innocent. She Puppet critiques the representation of Croft’s body in two ways: 1) it makes me think her design representationally and 2) it makes me feel her sensations as an avatar and the player’s control, or lack thereof. Repeating Croft’s death, over and over, reveals its limitation. She is programmed to only die one way, despite the level or cause of death. She sighs with the same sound effect, a sigh which, at first going unnoticed, eventually reveals itself as almost sensual before becoming strange. On this level, She Puppet functions as a cognitive video essay along lines of conventional feminist critique, paying attention, at other times, to Croft’s exaggerated body or uncomfortably forced positions. And yet, this reading is already complicated by the awareness of Ahwesh as the player sensationally involved with making Croft move. It is not simply representations of Croft, but Ahwesh’s playing of her. Later, Ahwesh makes Croft repeatedly run into male non-playable characters, revealing how they travel on paths and how they always seem to knock Croft over, even if she runs into them. Despite their limited movement, these male

73 NPCs are programmed to win every physical encounter with the female avatar. I recognize the sexualized designs of the video game developers and the designs of Ahwesh as player, perversely repeating death and ‘incorrect’ play. A dissonance, or tension, exists between these designs. As the title suggests, She Puppet works through this cognitive and sensational representation of Croft as an avatar. But throughout this critique, the machinima also turns this avatar into a character. Ahwesh is playing Croft, yet Croft is still Croft. Tere is a sense, through the voice-overs and shifts to first person perspective, that Croft is also a person. Tis cyborg, dying again and again, feels against the grain of the game. I begin to feel with her, invited to identify once I lose sense of the controller. Part of She Puppet’s critique of system limitations, in terms of gameplay and representation, is how it offers escape from these limitations. As a character, Croft escapes the rules of the game and discovers ways to avoid enemies, spend virtual time not moving forward. Like a true cyborg, Croft’s subjectivity is split, existing between and in spite of multiple actors providing voice-over. And her resistance to being an avatar, to playing the game, makes me feel. After her repeated deaths, she enters a desert landscape. Vultures circle overhead. She watches them and walks forward slowly. Tey attack her, and I want her to run because I begin to feel their claws and beaks and feel the way she stumbles when she is hit. Eventually, she enters a tunnel and turns to face them. Te vultures glide after her but are stuck against an invisible wall. Tey encounter one of the system’s spatial limitations and settle down, as if at rest, split between two competing game logics. Te vultures are programmed to follow and attack Croft but also programmed not to cross particular boundaries in the game world. I feel Croft’s relief as well as feeling these invisible rules that construct her being. Later, I am almost free when she swims, directionless, in shallow pools and speaks of landscapes seen in dreams. At the end of She Puppet, I feel wonderfully small and obscure, in the rain that procedurally appears from an empty, unrendered sky,

74 amongst seemingly empty buildings. When I feel with Croft, a cyborg constructed out of appropriation, She Puppet involves me in its critique through sensation. As Ahwesh appropriates the game technology, She Puppet appropriates my body and trains it physically and mentally. My encounter with machinima, as any encounter with art, constructs my subjectivity. For Lori Landay, sensation in virtual worlds is particularly productive. It is “a new virtual kinaesthetics,” felt by spectators as well as the actors who themselves perform the characters in games or motion-capture movies” (135). Landay draws on neuroscience research on mirror neurons, “brain cells which activate when a primate does an action but also when a primate observes an action” (130; emphasis added). She is interested in what this might mean for female subjectivity in relation to female performance. Women watching Joan Crawford or Lucille Ball dance feel more because they might have danced like those characters. Te feminist potential, I would argue, could be extended to male spectators as well. Te dissonance of cross-gender identification does not deny identification. If dissonance can be recognized and felt, then men can also embody a woman’s representation through mirror- neurons. Tus, She Puppet makes me feel the limitations of Croft’s movements as a cyborg and also reaches for a new kinaesthetics beyond the game’s intention and beyond the determinacy of a single life. Skawennati’s She Falls for Ages offers a dissonant sensation split between future and past, between singular vision and repeated narrative. Te Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) creation story is told in Second Life, an example of cyborg writing that makes use of appropriated technology for preservation and distribution. Its circulation allows these appropriated visuals to train my body to feel with an indigenous story. Te Iroquois creation story is not unified but exists in pluralities. In the Upper World, the Great Spirit pulls the Celestial Tree from the ground and sends his daughter, the Sky Woman, down to create land in the Lower World. As she falls or in She Falls for Ages, after she lands, animals

75 bring earth to the back of a great turtle, which grows into what is known as North America. In the particular telling of She Falls for Ages, the Sky Woman is Otsitsakaion, a telepath with a twin brother, Tehahontsihsónkhwa. Te twins are taught to control their special powers by their uncle, before meeting the rest of the world as adults at a celebration of the Celestial Tree. I move with the central figure, Otsitsakaion, my mirror neurons firing from simply observing. As a machinima, She Falls for Ages is much closer to a narrative short film than She Puppet. It has a handful of speaking roles, production designers, animators, etc., attributed in its credits. My fingers still itch to play the game Second Life, but the split between spectator and player is mitigated because Second Life is built for emergent narratives, to tell stories. Skawennati takes this a step further, turning a game meant to generate stories into a movie. Te aesthetic dissonance of She Falls for Ages exists in the tensions between a creative future and creative limitations, in the use of machinima for imagining alterity within the technological limitations of a game. Tis tension also exists between the virtual sci-fi rendering and the physical story of the creation of Turtle Island. Te future of She Falls for Ages is marked by the limitations of Second Life. At the centre of the utopia of Skyworld is the celestial tree, “developed over thousands of years of careful cultivation,” that powers the whole world. A montage introduces Skyworld, showing scientists, people socializing, and flying cars. I feel light, moved as much by the images as the narrator’s voice that describes the utopia. In the peaceful utopia that seems to float in a bright pink expanse, I feel the impossibility to completely render and understand the world in its perceptual hiccups and appropriated content. My body translates this cognitive ideal into physical sensation. But I am split, too, at this very moment as the frame rate slows below a comfortable level of human perception. Rendering too many objects at once, the system’s failure to imagine the future becomes tactile. It also depends on existing intellectual property which, opposed to the system’s lag, fit in too easily. Te scientists conduct tests on smoothly

76 rendered strawberries and the celestial tree blossoms electric lights that exist apart from the imperfectly rendered designs Skawennati introduces to the game. I feel the dissonance between appropriation and creation, between the retelling of a creation story and this particular virtual representation. Tis dissonance resists unity by offering visual lag and resists closure by foregrounding the singularity of this telling of the Iroquois creation story with these digital models. Bringing the Iroquois creation story into Second Life allows it to be incomplete and open to reinterpretation, dissonant to any sense of closure. As cyborg writing, She Falls for Ages is exemplary in how it tells a unifying myth through split subjectivities even as it focuses on Otsitsakaion, the Sky Woman who falls to the Lower World. While she is my principal point of sensation, I feel between other characters, touching and being touched in turn. Otsitsakaion represents this touching sensation narratively, since she is a telepath able to read thoughts. She, too, feels and thinks indeterminably. Her telepathy is not represented visually but aurally, which offers a virtual kinaesthetics. Te diegetic music that represents her telepathic feeling is a synaesthetic transposition from sound to touch. Tis sensation culminates when Otsitsakaion prepares to, and then falls from Skyworld. In a ceremony of renewal, Otsitsakaion’s brother, Tehahontsihsónkhwa, lifts the celestial tree with his telekinesis. Four neon cords hang from its roots. I feel airy, untethered because of the music that plays and the unrendered space beneath the celestial tree. I feel as though the cinematic world is coming undone because I am suddenly put against the limitations of a video game system that does not render everything. Te nothing beneath the celestial tree is cross-media, existing in both the video game and the movie. It doubles my fear of groundlessness. But just before Otsitsakaion jumps, the music swells with a floating drumbeat and steady pulse. I am reassured by this music, having been trained by its harmony to feel comfortable and excited. Each word the narrator speaks to describe Otsitsakaion’s descent

77 seems to move me, with her, safely in the transition from Skyworld to Earth. Te last images of She Falls for Ages teach me, my body, the political work that needs to be done. Planting the seeds she has brought from Skyworld in a small mound of earth on the turtle’s back, Otsitsakaion performs another ceremony, and the land begins to grow and grow. Tis movement is ecstasy, a transcendence rooted in the dissonance between the real cinematic dissolves that show the growth and the plastic, unreal figures of the animals around Otsitsakaion. Te growth is real, extending beyond the virtual and into my body. In these machinima, the cyborg comes to exist in the sensational difference between video game and movie, avatar and character, and in the differences I feel between these roles. Te cyborg as a woman takes shape on screen and in the space between the screen and my being, always indeterminate and changing. She will be different, later, once I am forced to change again by feeling and thinking with the cultural technologies that constantly regulate my being. As Haraway suggests, transgressing boundaries is only one part of political work. Machinima accomplish this transgression inherently, by appropriating dominant technologies and video game systems for narrative or poetic ends. But these ends can be and are reappropriated by dominant systems. Te work of She Puppet and She Falls for Ages lays in how they point to and resist that mutable dominance through dissonance. Tere is no return to innocence, no revisional unity. Tere is, in both machinima, a critique of and celebration of representation and system limitation occurring at the same time. Tus, there is a dissonance between cognitive reflection and cinematic identification. Te latter of which is also split, pulled apart by the doubly embodied spectator who wants to watch and play at the same time. She Puppet and She Falls for Ages teach me new ways of moving and being that ask me to split my subjectivity and become incomplete. I must die repeatedly, virtually, before I can grow.

78 Works Cited

Anable, Aubrey. Playing with Feelings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Manifestly Haraway, edited by Cary Wolfe, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 3-90. Landay, Lori. “Te Mirror of Performance: Kinaesthetics, Subjectivity, and the Body in Film, Television, and Virtual Worlds.” Cinema Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, 2012, pp. 129-136. Richmond, Scott. Cinema’s Bodily Illusions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. “She Falls for Ages,” Dir. Skawennati. 2017. Obx Labs, 2017. http://www.skawennati.com/SheFallsForAges/. “She Puppet.” Vimeo, uploaded by Peggy Ahewsh, 3 February 2010, https://vimeo.com/9197535. Accessed 7 April 2019. Sobchack, Vivian. “What My Fingers Knew.” Carnal Toughts, Berkley: University of California Press, 2004, pp. 53-84. Stephens, Elizabeth. “Sensation Machine: Film, Phenomenology and the Training of the Senses.” Continuum, vol. 26, no. 4, 2012, pp. 529-539. Tompson, Clive. “Te Xbox Auteurs.” Te New York Times Magazine, 7 August 2005, p. 21(L).

79 Endnotes

1 Tough readers today may question Sobchack’s skepticism to sensing in the virtual world, we must remember that Sobchack’s resistance to the virtual and its ability to mediate the lived body was part and parcel of the discourse in academia at the time. When digital technology was widely introduced in production in the early 2000s, many theorists suggested this was a fundamental break, not only between the image and reality, but also the image and the viewer.

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