user-generated

"The Machinimatic Moment" discusses a type of filmmaking that uses videogame engines (commonly referred to as machinima). I contend machinima exists within a liminal space between a number of diapoles including: production/consumption, play/cognition, and synthesis/critique. While much of machinima can be considered self-referential in that it consistently remarks upon the game itself and, in many ways, its limitations, other productions reveal sophisticated, compelling stories that are neither game nor traditional filmic narrative. I conclude by arguing that its liminality gives machinima distinctive and interesting qualities.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

In the *Location of Culture*, Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. A major site of ambivalence in the realm of digital art and literature lies in the fact that so much of this work exists outside of the economy of exchange and commodified culture. Where lies the future in an art that generates no income for its creators? In a user-generated culture, arts exist at a social interstice (in Nicolas Bourriaud's terms) that might provide a model to evade the pitfalls of consumer culture, commodified objects and monetary exchange. How might the social nature of these works and open source approaches create a space for a new literary/artistic model?

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)