✺ In conversation with • Vanessa Amoah Opoku.
Media studies scholar Aleena Chia and artist Vanessa Amoah Opoku will take you on a tour through volumetric fragments and technological imaginaries of what we have come to know as the Metaverse. Rather than putting artistic engagements in opposition to the metaverse moment, they will explore the complicity and partiality of reality capture as a technical infrastructure for the assembly of a sharded rather than seamless metaverse. Tracing the legacies of racial classification and extractivism in biometric and environmental capture, this conversation reflects on how the unruliness of the body dis/assembles the metaverse’s components-first approach to worldbuilding.
Biography
Aleena Chia is a lecturer in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She researches video game production cultures and digital wellness practices to understand how technologies of automation and ideologies of optimisation impact inequalities in cultural production (and public culture). Her research on videogames analyses game engines and production cultures. Her work on wellness investigates lucid dreaming, neuro-wearables, and disconnection from social media. She is co-author of Technopharmacology (Meson/University of Minnesota Press, 2022, with Joshua Neves, Susanna Paasonen, and Ravi Sundaram) co-editor of Reckoning with Social Media (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022, with Ana Jorge and Tero Karppi). Her work is published in Media Theory, Television and New Media, Internet Policy Review, Critical Studies in Media Communication, among others. Before joining Goldsmiths, she was an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University and a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland's Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies.
Credits: Jenni Toivonen / University of Tampere