Ambitious Avatar in a Virtual World

Research Background: This work explores the digital frontier of narrative cartography, which is bound to geographic and cartographic disciplines. It uses digital art in the form of machinima video, shot within a 3D graphic, virtual environment. The 3D graphic Avatar represents the user who is located at the intersection of a virtual geographical and emotional event and environment, offering a new critique of person and place. Research Contribution: Narrating Place is an interdisciplinary, international exploration of five ways that place can be narrated through digital imagery (synthetic, actual, mechanised, mediated, performed and observed). The curatorial team (a geographer, designer and film-maker ) drew on their respective disciplines in curating the 21 individual works that form a collective narrative of place. This work contributes to the discourses of place and identity. Situated in the aesthetics of multi author filmic works (Life in a Day by Kevin Macdonald or; Night on Earth by Jim Jarmusch), Narrating Place contributes to the discourses of layered narratives of place through multiple authorship and multidisciplinarity. Research Significance: The significance of this research is two fold. Firstly the interdisciplinary narrative expands contemporary critique in the domain of narrative cartography. Secondly, screened within the peer-reviewed program of a scientific conference (http://www.icc2013.org/?node=29), it challenges conventions of academic research dissemination and the contribution of creative practice.