Wiggledog's Song

Abstract
The EcoRaft Project is an interactive exhibit for teaching 8 to 12 year old children about restoration ecology. It uniquely approaches this educational task by using 3-D animations on desktop and tablet PCs to engage participants in a collaborative venture to restore graphically depicted ecosystems. Tablet PCs act as virtual rafts on which animated seeds and birds are carried between desktop PCs. The latter act as virtual islands in varying stages of deforestation.

Distilling information from complex content domains to be internalized by any target demographic is demanding. In the EcoRaft Project, the impact of complex data on the cognitive economies of participants is managed through the implementation of video, audio, and text techniques, as well as techniques of manipulating spatial orientations and social interactions. Research on how children multimodally resemiotize information was observed and employed to convey the most salient of the myriad details involved in both the ecological restoration process and the interactions of various organisms in a Costa Rican rainforest. The results of preliminary onsite investigations reveal that the project may be an effective pedagogical tool: EcoRaft extends beyond current cognitive theories on multimedia presentations, which predominately focus on 2-dimensional exhibits and agents, and demonstrates a novel paradigm for using 3-dimensional interactive exhibits in virtually augmented pedagogical settings.

Introduction
In “Simplicity & Complexity in Games of the Intellect,” biologist Lawrence B. Slobodkin asserts that one of the overarching principles behind adding or removing information from a simulation is to avoid the dullness of simplicity and the confusion arising from surfeit complexity:
Adding complexity to either the perceived world or a simplification of it must be done with a discrete purpose, lest complication become “obfuscation.” In creating a simplified or complicated system, the divergence from reality is acknowledged. To be simplistic or to obfuscate betrays misunderstanding, or worse, an attempt to hoodwink. [21]
The balance between obfuscation and over-simplicity is prominent in education and cognitive science literature, especially in conjunction with concerns over the limitations of working memory and cognitive load. In the face of these cognitive bounds, multimedia has been shown to be an effective didactic tool by way of disseminating information along multiple cognitive and sensory channels, with positive studies of multimedia in the natural sciences figuring prominently. [30] Although such studies tend to focus solely on visual and aural information, the use of mobile devices in augmented spaces, where virtual worlds commingle with real space, has been relatively unexplored as a didactic tool. In such spaces learners can engage in a social construction of knowledge while experiencing additional efficacious multimodal effects through haptic and proprioceptive stimuli.

Well grounded in the science of restoration ecology [2], the EcoRaft Project uses virtual environments to depict some of the flora and fauna of Costa Rican rainforests. Tablet PCs act as virtual rafts in a sea of real space and are maneuvered by participants to get plants and animals from thriving virtual islands to deforested ones. The islands are portrayed through animations on desktop PCs.

A novel orchestration of animation and networking techniques has made the EcoRaft Project an engaging model for enabling children to learn about elements of restoration ecology. The techniques include combining IrDA with TCP/IP networking to allow tablet PCs to share autonomous mobile code (as embodied agents) with desktop PCs, using sound to maintain the illusion that objects are transferred between islands and rafts, and providing novel interactions between embodied mobile agents and participants. It also employs cognitive, visual communication, and educational techniques and theories, applied along the guidelines of Richard E. Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML), to provide participants with an engaging learning experience. [13] But, EcoRaft extends CTML and its supporting theories into three dimensions, exploring ideas of multimodal learning and the resemiotization of information of its target demographic in a virtually-augmented three dimensional space.

Demographics
The targeted demographic for the project, children of ages 8 to 12, has been chosen in part because, like younger children, they tend to naturally resemiotize a kaleidoscope of available multimodal symbols in a transformatory fashion that not only favors their desire for self-expression, but also favors what they find attractive and relevant. [8, 14] This tighter focus for sense making suggests that the age group can comprehend the multimedia information the project presents with little distraction from what they consider to be irrelevant details. A task of a pedagogical method, then, is to discover and exploit what the targeted demographic is likely to key into.

Another factor to consider is that the 8 to 12 group is more likely than younger children to have some basic understanding of rainforests. The prior familiarity with the domain enables them to comprehend a carefully constructed multimedia presentation of the topic more easily. [29]

Agents
With the proliferation of cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and other computing devices, the adaptation of multimedia for learning through the interaction wjth mobile platforms is an interesting contemporary paradigm to explore. This is especially true when embodied mobile agents are used to make such learning more dynamic and, thus, more engaging. Increasing the level of engagement in a pedagogical arena facilitates learning. [3]

Related Work
The Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning
While this paper isn’t primarily about CTML, it is concerned with how efficaciously CTML techniques have been employed the EcoRaft Project.

Mayer’s theories have developed from work done by Sweller [22] and others on cognitive load theory and from theories supporting learner-centric instruction. The three principles that underlie CTML are that learning through two channels of perception are better than one, that working memory has a limited capacity, and that students actively process information as they construct knowledge. From these he has derived seven more principles he calls multimedia, spatial contiguity, temporal contiguity, coherence, modality, redundancy, and individual differences. The EcoRaft Project adheres to all seven, with the exception of the redundancy principle. According to this principle, using animation with narration and text is worse than using just animation and narration. The project violates this is in such a way as to alleviate any negative multimodal effects. How the project deals with the principles will be discussed further in the implementation section of this paper.

Arguments for constructivist theories of cognition are still prominent in the fields of education, visual communication, and cognitive science. Their lasting relevance has lead to many studies of how to apply them to multimedia learning.

According to Tudoreneau, the visualization of information extends cognitive resources by shifting the burden of internal representations of information to external media. [27] This supports the work by Sweller and others on cognitive load, which asserts that working memory has limited capacity, and the automation of information processing is more efficient than tasking the mind with developing schemas. This work also proffers that using dually modal sources of information improves learning by dividing the burden of developing schemas between two sensory channels. The use of schemata to get information from working memory into long-term memory is one of the main tenets of constructivist theories.

Lowe avers that adding motion (temporal change) may increase cognitive load by raising information processing demands and reducing the amount of relevant data that a participant consumes. Such temporal changes as transformations, translations, and transitions possibly increase the overall complexity of information while simultaneously directing the attention of subjects away from relevant material. This all results from a split-attention effect usually associated with combining text with animation. On the other hand, presentations in which participants have some control over the animations may have some salient effects on their construction of knowledge. [12]

On the other hand, animation alone is insufficient to effectively ensure the retention and transfer of information. Even with text added, animation may oversimplify the material and merely encourage mimicry by participants without fostering learning. [17] Additionally, researchers have had difficulty generalizing Mayer’s theory beyond his test cases. In some cases, animation with procedural text was used, in others descriptive text was used. In yet others, the quality of the animation could have been improved. [11, 23, 30]

CTML has yet to be refuted. The thrust of Mayer’s research has been with depictive diagrams, but most of the subsequent work challenging him has analyzed the use of descriptive diagrams. Also, CTML seems better suited to the natural sciences than the social sciences used in these other studies. [30] The ages of the human subjects of these researches might have been an issue too: children seem to learn better than adults with a combination of animation and text under certain conditions. [11]

The EcoRaft Project favors a constructivist approach to creating knowledge in the way it encourages children to learn about restoration ecology; it allows them to interact with the text, narration, and animations in a meaningful way, as well as with adults and other children. The very social aspect of exhibit invites cooperative learning between children of similar ages while allowing parents to provide scaffolding in the experience. The children are allowed to explore what the exhibit has to offer and develop their own knowledge while being gently guided to that knowledge by the structure the exhibit provides.

Agents
In the EcoRaft Project, mobile autonomous agents, code that can move between platforms and independently interact with their environment, are embodied in computer animated seeds and hummingbirds.

Mobile agents have been used for such tasks as network resource discovery [5] monitoring the status of the stock exchange [9], searching for the lowest prices of airplane tickets [16], and information dissemination and discovery for the military [7]. Mobile agents have been used in augmented reality scenarios [10], ubiquitous computing environments were they were tracked using RF and IrDA [20], moving information between computing platforms [19]. The EcoRaft Project uses embodied mobile agents to add to the “liveness” of the presentation, which it does by allowing the types of temporal change mentioned earlier to be initiated, and to some degree controlled, by participants carrying agents in Tablet PCs. This “helps strengthen the sense of direct manipulation that the interface conveys, thus making the interface more satisfying.” [24] For the interaction to be more satisfying is for it to be better suited for learning. [1]

Didactic games like Geney [4] have used such agents, but none have used 3-Dimensional embodiments or virtual environments as the EcoRaft Project does. The added dimensionality reduces cognitive load by reinforcing the illusion that the virtual spaces are extensions of the real space.

Implementation
The EcoRaft Project

The EcoRaft Project is an extension to the Virtual Raft Project. [26] The installation consists of three stationary computers that represent virtual islands, and three mobile devices that represent rafts or boxes. Each virtual island represents a different ecosystem. The ecosystems can be populated with hummingbirds, coral trees, and heliconia plants. Participants use the mobile devices to transport species from one island to another by bringing a mobile device near one of the stationary computers, allowing an animal or seed to leap onto the raft, and allowing the cargo to disembark into another stationary computer. One of the virtual islands acts as a national forest, a fully populated ecosystem that can act as a reserve, while the other two virtual islands can be deforested by the press of a button. Participants can repopulate a deforested island by bringing different species to it in a proper order by means of the mobile devices. It is easy to destroy a habitat, but although difficult to revitalize, by observing some important rules of ecological succession, it can be done. [2]

In general, a system that employs embodied mobile agents requires more than one computing platform that supports a software framework in which the agents can operate. While the physical platforms can be homogeneous, a heterogeneous mix of mobile and stationary platforms with some form of inter-device communication, such as TCP/IP, provides a richer engagement space for interacting with agents. Heterogeneous, accommodating, and virtual platforms enrich this engagement further.

The hardware for the EcoRaft Project includes three desktop PCs with onboard sound and video cards, and three tablet PCs with accelerometers. The desktop computers act as virtual islands to host embodied mobile agents, and the tablet PCs represent rafts that allow the agents to travel between the islands. The current implementation allows embodied agents like the EcoRaft Project’s hummingbirds and seeds to move from island to raft and vice versa. The computers currently run similar Java code bases, and while the hardware platforms vary and are of off-the-shelf variety, the virtual platforms are homogeneously provided by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Several techniques were used to facilitate the movement of embodied agents between platforms in an engaging manner. Although the general principles behind the cross-platform motility of agents have been vetted elsewhere [10, 19, 20, 26], this project provides an interesting combination of techniques to create a richly engaging interaction between agents and people.

CTML
The EcoRaft Project was developed in line with Mayer’s seven principles for the design of multimedia messages. These principles are:
1. Multimedia Principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
2. Spatial Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
3. Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students earn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
4. Coherence Principle: Students learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.
5. Modality Principle: Students learn better from animation and narration than from on-screen text.
6. Redundancy Principle: Students learn better from animation and narration than from narration, animation, and on-screen text.
7. Individual Differences Principle: Design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners and for high-spatial learners than for low-spatial learners. [13]
EcoRaft is certainly primarily an interactive graphical project, satisfying the first principle. Textual prompts and rewards are seamlessly embedded in the scenes they relate to, satisfying the second and third. Only informative material pertinent to narration, the agents, and the environment exist, satisfying the fourth. The narration is insufficient in noisy environments, so text had to be added. Such as it is, the text doesn’t contribute to a split-attention effect because the box it is in animates as it reveals new information. This draws a participant’s away attention from less important animation events and to more pressing information on changes in the state of the environment. Thus, the modality and redundancy principles are accommodated. The project was designed for high-spatial learners in mind, and by choosing the target age group of children 8 to12 years old, it ensures that the seventh principle is also adhered to.

General Design Considerations
To avoid obfuscation and to include as much complexity as the design team felt necessary to keep the project engaging, layering and separation were used in the graphics and sound. As Tufte asserts, “What matters—inevitably, unrelentingly—is the proper relationship among informational layers. These visual relationships must be in relevant proportion and in harmony to the substance of the ideas, evidence, and data conveyed.” [28] Hummingbirds and seeds were designed so that their details emerge as they move toward participants and the significant plants always stand out in relief against a blurred background of muted greens depicting other flora in the rest of the rainforest. This not only reduces computational expense in terms of calculating the lighting effects on the animated agents, but also emphasizes the important objects in the display. This effort complements Imhof’s first rule: “color spots against a light gray or muted field highlight and italicize data, and also help to weave an overall harmony.” [28] The high contrast also lowers the overall perceptual complexity of the presentation, and reduces the need to visually search for salient features. Similar tactics were used in designing the virtual rafts/boxes.

Several more principles on designing animation, cited by Thomas, were also exploited:
1. Characters and objects should seem solid.
2. Exaggerating the behavior of user interface objects makes the user interface more engaging.
3. The interface should reinforce the illusion of reality. [24]
Characters in EcoRaft were designed to appear solid by virtue of the way they interact with each other and the boxes. In a box, a seed will roll with the tilt of the tablet PC and make a sound as it caroms off sides it hits. Hummingbirds interact with the flowers on the plants and react to the tilting of a box as if confined to it, constantly struggling to get to the highest point.

Many things were exaggerated in the project to make it more engaging. Seeds drop out of trees and fly at the screen toward a nearby box holder, the colors of the plants are brighter than in reality, the hummingbirds are far more strikingly iridescent than they actually are, and the sounds associated with all the agents are hyperrealistically musical.

The illusion of reality is maintained by the smoothness of the translations of agents from platform to platform, the continuity of agents’ behavior in different environments, and the presences of tablet PCs as boxes for the agents, which allows participants to control and so better integrate virtual material with real space.

While these principles are not considered in Mayer’s work, they certainly complement it: without some measure of engagement, participants can’t be expected to pay attention to presented material.

Sound
Sound, as an integral part of movies, is a well explored topic. [25] Music often provides a sense of continuity between scenes. Similarly, when used as transition indicators, sounds in a mobile agent framework convey a more convincing sense of continuity between real and virtual spaces than animation alone is able to as agents move between platforms. For instance, on an island in the EcoRaft Project, a seed bounces on its way to a nearby raft after it is generated by a plant and emits a sound like a slide whistle playing an ascending scale. The seed then appears to roll into the raft from the direction of the island, accompanied by the same slide whistle playing a descending scale. This adds to the illusion that the seed is moving out of the screen. Similarly, transfer between rafts and islands is by hummingbirds is accompanied by the crescendo and diminuendo of a zipping sound characteristic of real hummingbirds. Sounds played in reverse order are used when the order of the platforms departed and entered are reversed.

Using conjunctive sounds emitted from the mobile and stationary devices during the transfer of agents supports the illusion that when a single agent leaves one platform the same agent then appears on the other. But, sound is also used to signal transitions in an island’s ecosystem. When an island’s ecosystem is deforested, ambient sound vanishes to reappear in increasing complexity as more flora and fauna are added to it. An additional musical score associated with the hummingbirds also textures the soundscape and adds to their overall attractiveness.

Using sound in these ways strengthens the apparent connection between the embodied agents and their surroundings by giving the virtual and real spaces complementary contributions to the overall acoustic environment.
Graphics
Agents should have a striking appearance that contrasts enough with their surrounding milieu so as to be easily tracked by an observer as they move about on any platform. Hummingbirds are naturally iridescent and both Heliconia plants and coral trees have lush and vibrant flowers. But, in the tropical landscape of a rainforest, all of these might be missed without some enhancements. Lighting, color, dimensionality, and movement are used to set these apart from their backdrop in the EcoRaft Project. In this regard, believability, more than reality, is an important aspect of being engaging. [15] By slightly exaggerating the look of key agents, in giving them richer textures and modeling them in 3-D, and by diminishing the visual impact of their background (created through the use of filters and 2-D images), the stage is set for a more dynamic interaction between agents and users. For instance, although seeds don’t normally bounce a great distance from a plant to land in a box accompanied by a whistling sound, this behavior is acceptable in The EcoRaft project; other aspects of the project are just hyperreal enough to allow for this without caricaturizing the serious goal of the project (to teach concepts of ecological restoration.) Thus, the look and behavior of the agents should complement their environment and maintain the metaphor of the simulation. [6]

An additional consideration is frame rate. As the frame rate of an animated scene dips below 30 fps, so does the attraction of the scene and its characters. To prevent this in the EcoRaft Project, level of detail techniques were employed.

Behavior
In the EcoRaft Project, complex behaviors are exhibited primarily by hummingbirds, which currently can feed, perch, or starve, or fly between stationary computers and mobile devices. As mentioned earlier, the behavior of agents should complement the ambience of their environment. Yet, this is hardly enough in itself to make an agent engaging. To achieve a higher level of engagement, embodied agents must act and interact in a manner that entails a sufficient amount of complexity found in correlative real system. When the behavior is suitably complex, a participant gets the impression of observing a believable and coherent system, while experiencing activities s/he may have not been privy to otherwise. An acceptable illusion of reality is maintained although the artificial system does not have the full complexity of the real one.
Embodied agents can be further enhanced if allowed to interact with their observers directly. In the EcoRaft Project, a webcam is used to detect motion in front of an island. This signals one of the plants on the island, a centropogon vine, to sway, and increases the likelihood that existing hummingbirds will fly toward participants and display themselves. In doing so, the birds usually look forward, appearing to be enrapt momentarily by any observer before flying off.
Real-world sensing and interactivity like this lends credibility to an agent. The outward gaze of the hummingbirds at nearby people is designed to enhance the sense of continuity between the virtual world of the hummingbirds and real space and further engage our attention. [1]

Compelling Interaction
These behaviors and interactions encourage a sense, within the user, of participation in the agent’s behavior, and thus add to the quality of the engagement. Allowing 3-D embodied agents to move through networks of heterogeneous stationary and mobile devices as a result of human action fosters this sense of connectivity. Furthermore, by allowing an agent to explore the confines of the visible virtual space of its mobile and stationary devices adds naturalness to its behavior. Of course, a seed wouldn’t fly about the virtual confines of a raft on its own, but with the addition of accelerometers to the platform, the seed can roll about in response to a user tilting the device in a realistic fashion. Similarly, a hummingbird might be expected to fly to the highest part of its particular confines as that device is tilted.

Part of the novel experience of the EcoRaft Project is the apparently seamless way plants and hummingbirds transfer from stationary computers to mobile devices and vice versa. The smoothness of the transition helps minimize behaviors unexpected by participants, and helps maintain the illusion of continuity between the real and virtual spaces, thus eliminating some undesirable complexity from the environment of the project.

Evaluation
Thus far, the EcoRaft Project has been presented at the SIGGRAPH 2005 Emerging Technologies exhibit, at several other conferences, twice at the Discovery Science Center in Orange County California, and in a research lab at UCI. During the presentations, semi-formal investigations were conducted into how engaging EcoRaft is and how effective it is as a pedagogical tool. Questionnaires were used, and participants taken aside and interviewed. Additionally, some of the design team took notes while observing participants interacting with the installation. The overall attitude of the participants to the project was enthusiasm, with few complaining that it was too simplistic or too complex. Several claimed to have learned something about restoration ecology, but no research was conducted to investigate whether such knowledge was going to be retained long-term or whether it was transferable.

What was evident was that peer-to-peer instruction was occurring as some children aided others, and accompanying adults offered the children some instructional scaffolding. The EcoRaft Project was offering a space for learning to be socially constructed.

Discussion
Complexity in the project was reduced by introducing clear cues as to what information should be attended to at any particular time. EcoRaft was specifically designed to deal with the putatively multimodal way children of ages 8 to 12 resemiotize data. The appropriateness of the exhibit for this demographic was validated when, from both observations and questions made by the design team, it was apparent that younger children enjoyed playing with mobile agents but didn’t grasp the overall theme the way the children in the intended age group did.

Unfortunately, the questions asked by the design team did not seek to reveal whether any knowledge constructed by participants was meaningful. Meaningful knowledge is that which can be retained and transferred. [13] Although, with the narrative guidance of construction provided by other participants, the design team, and the project itself, it may be expected that the children engaged in an active process of meaning making. [18] This implies that some retention and transferability of information did occur.

To increase the significance of analyzable data, both retention and transfer questions should be asked of participants. Retention questions should be explanative, that is ask how to perform certain tasks. Transfer questions should include inquiries about redesign, troubleshooting, prediction (inference), and conceptualization. [13] Below is a list of some suggested questions in respective order.
Retention
Explanation: What is the order of succession that must be used to repopulate an island?
Transfer
Redesign: How would you modify the project to repopulate an island faster?
Troubleshooting: If a Heliconia seed wasn’t germinating, how would you make it grow?
Prediction: If the hummingbirds vanished from the rainforests of Costa Rica, what would happen to the trees?
Conceptual: Why are hummingbirds important to rainforests?

Scoring the answers to these questions like these would also allow metrics to be collected and analyzed. This would better reflect the pedagogical success of the EcoRaft Project.

While generally following Mayer’s guidelines, the Project also uses other principles of artistic design and animation. These are necessarily employed and in a complementary fashion because of the need to incorporate 2-D narrative text in the 3-D environment and because the design team hoped to exploit the impact of levels of engagement on the learning experience of participants. The studies of multimedia learning have mostly focused on static text. The design team has observed that animation and narration that guide the gaze of onlookers toward informative text associated with a multimedia presentation enhances their overall experience. This might have worked out differently had the exhibit required more attention to the details of the activity in the virtual environments, including speedier responses on the part of the participants, but this was alleviated by the overall implemented considerations of balancing simplicity and complexity. Mayer’s theories can be extended with the other principles employed in EcoRaft.

Future Work
In the future, the question-asking strategy will provide more salient data, and the exhibit will be shown to other audiences. Current development seems driven towards a Flash version of the EcoRaft project, which should remove some of the cognitive load of participants through the use of simpler, vector graphics. This shift will thus also allow the developers to include more complex agent behaviors while incurring less computational overhead. Ultimately, it will make the project more accessible to potential users through the Internet, giving children greater access to EcoRaft’s important message.

Conclusion
The EcoRaft Project extends the principles of Mayer’s CTML by incorporating principles of artistic design, by combining 2- and 3-dimensional effects, and by further exploiting the benefits of multimodal learning through encouraging haptic and social engagement. In doing so, the project provides a novel paradigm for the presentation of multimedia in a pedagogical setting. With the introduction of metrics to the project, the design team may be able to generalize the techniques it used in a way that exceeds the usability of CTML alone.

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In 1994, the U.S. Department of State began investigating the trafficking in persons as a result of human rights interests.1 The “Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000” lays out a description of severe trafficking of persons as follows:
(A) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or
(B) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.2
Trafficking is also commented there as being a modern form of slavery, involving some 700,000 persons annually trafficked inter- and intra-nationally; 50,000 of which may pass into the U.S..3 The act amends methods of analyzing countries that are to be recipients of economic assistance from the U.S., creates a task force to monitor and combat trafficking, and provisions for economic assistance to both victims and potential victims, as well as the management of other trafficking concerns. There are an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide.4
Subsequent to this, in 2001, the State Department produced “The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report”. This stipulates four conditions governments should adhere to in order to be considered to have minimally eliminated the trafficking of persons in their domains, with an additional seven criteria regulating the efforts the governments appear to be exercising to do so. Depending upon how a country fares in these regards, they are placed in one of three tiers, the first tier being of the most compliant with the minimal standards, and the third tier consisting of countries neither compliant with the four standards, nor making an effort to do so. The second tier encompasses those countries not compliant but appear to be making an effort.5
To a great degree, both acts focus on women and children, which, due to their relatively compromised economic status throughout most of the world, makes them easier prey than men to opportunistic trafficking. But trafficking in men, women, and children has transpired for centuries, and how the entrapment and subjugation of people is now “new” is unclear. What is clear, however, is that it is now statutorily illegal throughout most of the world to own slaves, and that rapid social changes combined with the post-WWII population explosion as well as the “modernization and the globalization of the world economy”6 have provided many new opportunities for thugs and their slyly cooperating governments to exploit a growing number of poor people. Many traditional agricultural societies now suffer from the displacement of land into the hands of the elite:
The forced shift from subsistence to cash-crop agriculture, the loss of common land, and government policies that suppress farm income in favor of cheap food for the cities have all helped bankrupt millions of peasants and drive them from their land—sometimes into slavery.7
The end of the Cold War may have compounded the problem redirecting the focus of nations and companies away from human rights issues and towards commercialization and financial gain. This has increased the gap between the wealthy and the poor.8
With the numbers of available victims increasing, and the onus of ownership gone (one can’t own a slave anymore), slaveholders no longer need to care for their workers for extended periods, and tend to invest in them lightly, providing them with little or no medical care and just enough food for subsistence. With the focus on high profits over short periods, and with a glut of poor driving the cost of slaves down, slaves who are too young, too old, or too infirm are disposable. This can most strikingly be seen in Thai brothels and Brazilian batterias, and to a far lesser degree in still other forms of the new slavery. One thing that all forms of the new slavery have in common is that “people are enslaved by violence and held against their wills for purposes of exploitation”9.
Chattel slavery, contract slavery, and debt bondage, are three of many types of slavery still being practiced today.10 Among them, chattel slavery, which resembles the racially inflected behavior of the old slavery (not only the bondage of blacks in U.S. history, but also a much older Muslim form of servitude) is the least common, but may still be seen in parts of north and western Africa, including Mauritania where White Moors (Beydannes/Arab-Berbers) have enslaved blacks for hundreds of years. According to the CIA’s The World Factbook 2001 on the background of Mauritania,
Independent from France in 1960, Mauritania annexed the southern third of the former Spanish Sahara (now Western Sahara) in 1976, but relinquished it after three years of raids by the Polisario guerrilla front seeking independence for the territory. Opposition parties were legalized and a new constitution approved in 1991. Two multiparty presidential elections since then were widely seen as being flawed; Mauritania remains, in reality, a one-party state. The country continues to experience ethnic tensions between its black minority population and the dominant Maur (Arab-Berber) populace.11
Conspicuously missing is mention of Mauritania’s slave population. The country has the largest proportion of slaves to free people than anywhere else in the world12, yet it doesn’t even appear in the U.S State Department’s report on trafficking.
According to iAbolish (a project of the American Anti-Slavery Group):
Estimates to the number of black Africans enslaved in Mauritania ranges from 100,000 as many as one million. Chattel slavery, in which one person is owned as another's property, has existed in Mauritania for 800 years, born out of racism and a skewed version of Islamic fundamentalism. Slaves are raised to believe that serving their Arabo-Berber masters is a religious duty, and most remain in bondage their entire lives.13
Out of a population of about 2.7 million people, about one third may be slaves. Most of these were born from generations of slaves and know no other life. They spend their days monotonously working on their masters’ farms or in mines, or performing manual labor in their masters’ shops in the cities. But, slavery was abolished in Mauritania by its government in 1980. Unfortunately, many Maur slaves don’t know it, and those that do, and act on it, are frequently tortured and/or killed. There are compelling issues of illiteracy, lineage, religion, and cultural isolation that keep the slaves bound to their masters. Not only are the slaves not educated, but surviving elders who have been indentured their whole lives naturally reinforce the master-slave relationship, and the Muslim language they share with their masters isolates them from other, non-slave, blacks in the country. The white masters, running a country that’s over 2 billion dollars in debt, and depending mainly on local agriculture for survival (the heavily commercialized, rich offshore fishing has been depleted, and the value of iron ore, their chief export, has decreased on the world market), continue to rely on the grunt labor of their slaves to farm their lands for them. When groups of slaves have claimed previously lands discarded by their masters, they’ve been driven off, possibly out of the masters’ need to keep as much land as possible in a dwindling local economy, but just as likely out of a desire to cripple the independence of their slaves. Attempts by slaves to access their constitutional freedom have been met with indifference by Mauritania’s courts, which run by slaveholders, naturally protect their own interests. Also, slaves are not granted citizenship, limiting their ability to appeal the courts’ decisions. Furthermore, the government frequently harasses in-country anti-slavery organizations like El Hor and SOS Slaves, preventing aid from reaching the needy.
To compound issues, female Haratines are accorded a higher value than the males (a young, healthy female for over $1000, a male for half that15), presumably for their ability to produce yet more slaves, as well as for the sex they might provide to their masters. Children, too, have a value:
Enslaved women are often kept as concubines, raped by members of the master's family. Slaves are not allowed to marry without the master's consent, and woman are stripped of the right of motherhood: At the master's whim, their children can be taken from them and sold off or given as wedding gifts. As an act of repentance, masters will often donate one of their slaves to the poor.16
The natural result of whimsical, political, and punitive separations of family members is that male slaves are less committed to keeping their families together, further preventing the slaves from organizing themselves into a body capable of effectively plying for their freedom.
In 1969, there was a large shift of the population from rural areas of Mauritania to the capital, Nouakchott: “When the first great drought began in 1969 and the city became a center for food aid, refugees from the countryside flooded in. Today it holds between 500,000 and 600,000 people—over a quarter of the country’s population.”17
When white masters moved into the city, which had become the capital only nine years earlier, some of their slaves came with them. And, given the opportunity to create new businesses for themselves, the Beydannes began to exploit the skills of their slaves to operate a variety of shops, and paid them nothing.18
Although there are many obvious parallels between Mauritanian slavery and the familiar old-style slavery of the southern U.S. (and elsewhere), the goal is not to demonstrate those, but to show how Mauritania’s slavery, as a historically older system, has taken on characteristics of the new (modern) slavery. As mentioned earlier, one of the characteristics of modern slavery is its illegality; another is the use of violence, or the threat of violence, used to keep the slaves under the control of the masters, and yet a third characteristic is high profitability over a short period. As more slaves come to recognize their right to freedom and move away from their masters, and as their plight becomes more prominent due to anti-slavery groups like iAbolish, El Hor, and SOS Slaves, et al, one can expect the level of violence used by the masters to maintain their control over the slaves will necessarily increase due to their historical dependence on the latter for farming, mining, running shops, and other tasks. In a system of slavery where generations of people are born into servitude, the need to resort to violence to enforce slavery isn’t very pressing. But, as the population has become more urbanized, the profitability of having slaves has increased unprecedentedly due to the marketability of their skills and their low overhead. Also, the White Moors, outnumbered by non-citizen, non-slave, Afro-Mauritanians, are desperate to maintain their position in the country. As a result of the latter groups petition for more rights, the Beydannes took violent action in 1989: “The torture, maiming, and murder of over five hundred Afro-Mauritanians, many of them members of the military or holders of public positions, has been documented by the United Nations”19. The threat of violence towards groups considered dissenting by the government in Mauritania is real. Although the nature of Mauritanian slavery currently exploits the Haratines for high profits over a long period of time, probably a full lifetime, instead of the much shorter periods of servitude seen in countries like Thailand, the evolution of this old system into the new type of slavery is apparent.
The question remains as to why the U.S. doesn’t recognize the existence of slavery in Mauritania. The answers may lie in the strategic position of having an economically disadvantaged, coastal ally in northwestern Africa. With Algeria to the north and Senegal to the south both being destabilized by internal distress caused by fundamentalist Islamic factions, the U.S. may have found a relative stable pawn in Africa. With the hundreds of millions of dollars the U.S. pours into Mauritania, and the latter’s continuing development of a telecommunications industry despite having a poor internal transportation system (only one railway system exists, for mining, and there are few roads) which might one might assume would be more important, gathering intelligence about the surrounding countries for the U.S. may be one aspect of their relationship.
Another aspect is Mauritania’s support of Israel. According to Arabic News.com in November, 2000:
The Nouakchott government is still persistent to maintain normalization with Israel. A process that started several months ago, when it established diplomatic relations with Israel and refused to sever them.

To this effect, Mauritania's minister of telecommunications al-Rashid Weld Saleh stressed that his country will not sever its relations with Israel under any condition.

Commenting on the call advocated by the Islamic summit on the states that established relations with Israel to cut them, the Mauritania's minister added that peace is the choice of the government of Mauritania and that his country is committed to this option.19
That Israel is of vital interest to the U.S. in the Middle East is unquestionable. That there is anything but a political advantage to Mauritania in this is moot.
A final reason for the lack of U.S. recognition of slavery in Mauritania may be a perceived plausible deniability. According to Kevin Bales in Disposable People: new slavery in the global economy:
Since some human rights organizations persist in demonstrating the existence of slavery, the government (of Mauritania) has set up two “human rights” organizations of its own: the National Committee for the Struggle against the Vestiges of Slavery in Mauritania and the Initiative for the Support of the Activities of the President.20
With the voices of anti-slaver groups in country being squelched, the account that slavery can be disregarded as existing as a mere remnant is the loudest. But, the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.
The socio-political scene in Mauritania is even more complex than I’ve laid out, involving issues of France’s historical and current interest, Mauritania’s old slave trade to the west, Israel’s dumping nuclear waste in the Mauritania, and others. But, the scope of this paper is necessarily limited. Having shown how a small, relatively unindustrialized country steeped in a traditional type of slavery has been developing characteristics of the modern type, attributes of slavery in Thailand, a country highly exploited by the U.S., Japan, and other countries for its sex industry won’t be surprising.
According to an article in Time Asia.com
With a girl's virginity selling for as much as $3,500 in Bangkok, recurring recessions have ensured a ready supply of daughters sold by poverty-stricken families. The number of child prostitutes in Thailand is at least 60,000, though estimates go as high as 200,000. Almost all are working under duress: 21st century slaves.21
Bales estimates between 500,000 and 1 million slaves currently work in Thailand.22 Although most of Thailand is agriculturally prosperous, an economic boom in the 1980’s and 1990’s helped transform the country into an industrial state: “in a country the size of Britain, one-tenth of the workforce moved from the land to industry in just 3 years…the number of factory workers doubled from less than 2 million to more than 4 million in eight years…and urban wages doubled.”22 Unfortunately for the poor in northern Thailand, whose customs and Buddhist religion disregard women, the development of industry in the south created a greatly increased gap in income between them and those in the south. Selling children for sex slavery to brothels in the south is part of their customs. The brokers of the slaves may even live in their villages. Where there is a glut of poor workers who have moved to the south, the northern Thai send their girls, where they are driven into prostitution. Although some of the girls may have a good idea of what prostitution is through mothers or other relatives who have done it, many don’t fully understand it until they are forced to have sex with strangers. Many aren’t even aware that they are to become prostitutes, but expect some job in industry. This is contract slavery, where a contract is negotiated but violence and the threat of violence are ultimately used to enforce whatever policies the owners of the contracts choose to pursue. Additionally, this becomes debt bondage; because the girls are sold by their parents to the brokers, the girls must work of f a debt that will be managed by the pimps and brothel owners. In the case of Thai prostitution, the duration of a prostitutes service is further determined outside of any (specious) contract by such factors as age and health, with victims of HIV being sent home to die. Thus, working as a sex slave requires less time of one’s natural life than does being a chattel slave.
With a glut of new poor and working class wage earners willing to spend money on prostitution in a culture that advocates spending time with a prostitute as being part of a night out, there is always a need for more prostitutes. Thus, sex slaves are plenty, and when there aren’t enough Thai girls, Burmese and Laotians can be imported.
In 1960, prostitution was made illegal in Thailand. Shortly after, another law specified that women in the entertainment business were to provide sex services.22 This and other proclamations by the government have further created an atmosphere fertile for sexual abuse. As Bales describes it:
The machinery for social protection is so ineffectual that slaves are bought and sold…the law can do little against the combined strength of a sexist culture, rationalizing religion, amoral exploitative economy, and corrupt government…Thailand is a country sick with and addiction to slavery.23
A revision of the prostitution law was made in 1997 that includes punishing sex customers. But this too is hardly enforced.
This fits neatly into the scheme of modern slavery: the slaves are disposable, quick profits are made on them, prostitution is illegal, and violence is used to enforce the enslavement. Much the same as in Mauritania, the government is culpable in the persistence of slavery. Notable here is that race is not an issue in Thai slavery, although countries like Japan may treated imported Thais with prejudice. Discrimination based on income is another element of the new slavery, and can be similarly observed in Pakistan, Brazil, and India. Thailand is in the Trafficking Act reports second tier.24
Slavery is global and takes on many forms, but many of the same key factors described here are common to them all. Although I haven’t discussed guises of debt bondage, the most prevalent type of slavery, such as the practice of peshgi in Pakistan, or mentioned the war slavery of Burma, where children are kidnapped and forced into military service, the importance of these in evidencing modern slavery isn’t diminished. Human rights groups struggle for fair wages and treatment of the victims in these countries as well, but large investments in slavery by governments and slaveholders constantly thwart them there, as elsewhere. However, as involvement by the United Nations and the U.S. indicate, awareness has grown as a result of their efforts. Hopefully, with properly applied economic sanctions, and incentives to re-educate slaves, modern slavery, an abstraction of the evolution of older forms, can be abolished.

References
1. U.S. Department of State, “Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report,” (2001) (25 May 2002).
2. U.S. Department of Justice, “Division A—Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000,” Violence Against Women Office (2000), (25 May 2002).
3. Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 8.
4. U.S. Dept. of State.
5. U.S. Dept. of State.
6. Bales, 13.
7. Ibid., 13.
8. Ibid., 13.
9. Ibid., 20.
10. Ibid., 19.
11. Ibid., 20.
12. Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, (2001), (27 May 2002).
13. Bales, 80.
14. American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), "Paradise Under the Master's Foot," (2001), iAbolish.com (27 May 2002).
15. Bales, 86.
16. AASG.
17. Bales, 98.
18. Ibid., 99.
19. Arabic News.com, “Mauritania refuses to sever relations with Israel,” Arabic News.com (17 November 2000), (28 May 2002).
20. Bales, 115.
21. Alex Perry and Mae Sai, “Child Slavery,” Time Asia (2002), (28 May 2002).
22. Bales, 75.
23. Bales, 78.
24. U.S. Dept. of State,.

Bibliography
American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG). "Paradise Under the Master's Foot." (2001). iAbolish.com (27 May 2002).
Arabic News.com. “Mauritania refuses to sever relations with Israel.” Arabic News.com (17 November 2000). (28 May 2002).
Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1999).
Central Intelligence Agency. The World Factbook. (2001). (27 May 2002).
Perry, Alex and Sai, Mae. “Child Slavery.” Time Asia (2002). (28 May 2002).
U.S. Department of Justice. “Division A—Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.” Violence Against Women Office (2000). (25 May 2002).
U.S. Department of State. “Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report.” (2001). (25 May 2002).

(Death to the Queen)
In Aliens (James Cameron, 1991 ), contrary to Carol Clover’s exposition of the Final Girl, abject fear may be initially gendered feminine, but it is later shared by both sexes as the film progresses. Additionally, whereas the tomboyish Final Girl may be feminized by her fear, Ripley’s fear gives evolves into aggression. Ripley is gendered by her violent behavior, her relationship to the marines, and her feelings for Newt. The alien queen is the monstrous externalization of the nightmares Ripley has carried within from the prequel, Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), and as such is also the embodiment of Ripley’s sense of alienation. By defeating the queen, Ripley purges herself of Final Girl-ishness and drives the narrative to fully emerge as a woman.

According to Carol Clover, a common factor in slasher flicks from the 70’s and 80’s is the Final Girl, the character who thwarts the monster and survives. (Clover, 37). The Final Girl is not coded in stereotypically feminine ways. “The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine . . . . Her smartness, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart” (Clover, 40). The Final Girl is not set up to be a sexual spectacle, and her role is that of the heroic survivor of the rampage of the typically male killer. The Final Girl has become a heroine by adopting the mantel of a male hero while preserving certain stereotypical feminine frailties, like screaming and running. In Aliens, these frailties are replaced with Ripley’s maternal caring and defensive aggression.

In the beginning of Aliens, after Ripley has awakened aboard a space station over Earth and has been told by Burke that her hyper-sleep in space had lasted fifty-seven years, she convulses and screams as an alien larva (burster) attempts to erupt from her chest. Although this is only a dream, it portends the nightmares of days to come, and illuminates her own feelings of alienation and isolation. She has been distanced from the world she new fifty-seven years ago both literally and figuratively. Ripley doesn’t recognize the space station, she never reaches Earth, and her daughter is dead. Additionally, a corporate tribunal strips Ripley of her flight status and relegates her to working on docks after discrediting her previous experience with the alien on the Nostromo. Her terror of her nightmares appears to gender her female, but she is now working in a stereotypically male position. In a key scene illustrating Ripley’s sense of alienation, having just shown the spectator one of the spider-like aliens (face-huggers) clamped to the face of Newt’s father, with Newt’s stratospheric screams punctuating the terror of the moment, the film cuts to a close-up of a rising thread of smoke, then pans down to show the cigarette in Ripley’s long, bony fingers, which resemble the articulated limbs of the face-hugger. The camera then moves up Ripley’s arm and settles on her face, in profile. She stares at her hand with dark, inscrutable eyes. The sense conveyed is that she is metamorphosing into an alien herself, losing her humanity, her femaleness, in her isolation.

After rejecting the offer by Burke and Lt. Gorman to accompany them to LV-426, the planet on which the monster in Alien was found, Ripley awakens from another nightmare screaming and sweating. The camera lingers on the upper half of her body, while she sits and massages the place the burster would have emerged. Her hand drifts to the left of this place, emphasizing her breast, highlighting that she is still a female.

On board the Sulaco, the marines’ spaceship traveling to LV-426, Ripley is demonstrably feminized through the eye of the camera as well as through her relationship with the marines. When she explains what the alien in previous encounter did to her crew, and responds quivering in frustration to the marines trivializing the creature as a bug, she is portrayed as having far less machismo than they. Also, when Ripley drives the cargo-loader to move some equipment, when the camera shoots Hicks and Apone agape and then reverse shoots Ripley as she pauses with a load, obviously poised for the feminizing male gaze, she is also feminized by her frailty relative to the cumbersome bulk of the loader. Her femaleness is even developed in comparison with the female marines.

After the lids rise off the sleep-chambers in the Sulaco, Ripley lies with a hand behind her head and writhes sensuously, momentarily, as she stirs awake next to the more rigid bodies of male marines still sleeping. The contrast between her and the butch, female marines is more complex. While Vasquez does pull-ups, the camera zooms in on her admiring her flexing biceps with Ripley dressing in the background, relatively out of shape and less buxom. As Drake does pull-ups next to Vasquez in a tightly framed shot, her femaleness is established despite her muscularity, do to her figure and softness. When Hudson asks her if she had ever been mistaken for a man, and she denies it but then asks whether he had ever been mistaken for one, the film draws attention to the motif of what constitutes masculinity and femininity. Vasquez is certainly more macho than Ripley, but is less masculine looking than Drake; and her relationship with Drake is underplayed in sexual terms. Additionally, Vasquez is feminized in the close-up of her face, displaying quiet fear, as the marines prepare to leave the personnel carrier for the first time. Later though, in a close-up as she and Gorman are about to blow themselves up in the face of an overwhelming attack by the aliens, fear is shared between them. This is contrary to the behavior of Vasquez and Gorman the first time the aliens are encountered, when Vasquez erupted into violence with her gun while Gorman sat paralyzed by fear inside the personnel carrier. Fear is associated with a loss of control, and as it becomes shared by all of the humans, it becomes less gender-specific and less feminizing. When Vasquez asks Hudson if he had ever been mistaken for a man, she portends the stereotypically feminine whining he will display several times after the aliens are encountered the first time. Whining, though, becomes his unique expression of fear, as Newt’s ear-piercing screams are hers. Fear itself is ungendered.

Family and belonging are other motifs in Aliens, and it is through her bonding with others that Ripley is eventually able to banish the demon she feels she is becoming, the alien queen, and settle into a stabilized, womanly, role in a family.

But, Ripley’s womanliness is not portrayed with the same feminine frailty the Final Girl exhibits. Ripley’s self-absorbed whining subsides and transforms into aggression in several instances, each in connection with Newt. When the aliens first attack the marines, under the heat exchangers on LV-426, Ripley commandeers the personnel carrier after securing Newt in her seat and plows through the secreted resin of the aliens to rescue the marines. Later, when the aliens attack en masse in the control room, Ripley fires her assault rifle with Newt by her side. And finally, Ripley wields weapons when searching for Newt the alien lair, and dons a destructive exoskeleton to defend Newt from the queen back on board the Sulaco.

Ripley is gendered female through her maternal aggression, as is the queen. Both are defending their families. Newt is a surrogate for the daughter Ripley lost. She is the first person Ripley meets that Ripley can relate to. Like Ripley, Newt is a Final Girl, being the sole survivor of the colony, and Ripley is the first person from the Sulaco that she is willing to talk to. Hicks too is a member of this family.

Subsequent to Ripley rescuing the marines from under the heat-exchangers, the camera focuses on Hicks in the personnel carrier, then in a reverse shot freezes momentarily on Ripley’s smile as he agrees with her to return to the Sulaco to nuke the site from orbit. He and the other marines, at this point, have accepted Ripley into their midst. They all have a shared experience with the aliens. Most importantly, though, is that Ripley’s relationship with Hicks begins here and develops in concert with her relationship with Newt. It is Hicks who intimately shows Ripley how to fire the assault rifle and grenade launcher. It is also he who ends up clutching Ripley and Newt after the marines slay the freed face-huggers in the med-lab. The locator device passed from Hicks, to Ripley, to Newt, further establishes the connection between the three of them. After the sentry guns are installed in the tunnel, the camera zooms in on the locator as Hicks hands it to Ripley, then frames both of them in an intimate close-up as Hicks claims that the locator doesn’t mean that they are engaged. Later, in the med-lab, Ripley discusses death and aliens with Newt, who also suffers from nightmares, and gives her the locator. Afterwards, Ripley turns off the overhead lamp so that dark, ambient lighting warms her face, and she hugs and kisses Newt

In order for Ripley to achieve unity with Hicks and Newt, she must defeat the queen, whose egg-laying prowess far outstrips Ripley’s reproductive capacity and threatens the surviving humans with alien embryo implantations and death. Ripley, petite and soft in comparison, reflects a warmer, mammalian maternity than the monstrous and chitinous queen engenders. The queen’s penetrating jaws, and the phallic ovipositor the queen castrates in order to chase Ripley and Newt, highlight some sexual destabilization on her part, which Clover asserts is an aspect of the monolithic killers in slasher flicks (Clover, 40), and which feminizes Ripley even more in contrast. Both are protecting their people, but the queen’s intimacy with her brood is ambiguous. Additionally, the queen represents the source of the infected dreams and lifestyle Ripley acquired after awakening from her first alien encounter. The gravity of these factors is revealed when Ripley says to the alien queen on board the Sulaco, “Get away from her, you bitch!” Ripley maternally asserts her protectiveness of Newt and defines what must occur for her family to exist. By expelling the queen through the airlock of the Sulaco, Ripley purges herself of the nagging demons that used to alienate her from other people, and secures her maternal position as a woman in her family. At the conclusion of the film, Ripley, Newt, and Hicks are the only humans to survive the aliens. The closing credits begin to roll with Ripley sleeping behind Newt in a slightly elevated and protective way, in a medium shot aboard the Sulaco, with Newt asleep in a sleep-chamber in the foreground.

In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey describes the roles of men and women in Hollywood films in terms of Freudian scopophilia and Jaques Lacan’s mirror theory. To her, Women are coded for visual pleasure, while men are coded to be ideal egos, more perfect reflections of the male spectator, who drive the narratives. (Mulvey, 62-63). But she also asserts that women, by lacking penises, suggest castration, so women offer a threat of spectatorial dysphoria in addition to scopophilic pleasure, and so are fetishized and filmed from a sadistically voyeuristic perspective. (Mulvey, 64). While this psychoanalytic approach may explain to some small degree how filmmakers please male spectators, it doesn’t explain how they please female spectators. Additionally, it doesn’t explain the number of films over the last thirty years featuring fighting women.

Aliens portrays men and women in non-stereotypical ways. Although Ripley stimulates some male visual pleasure by walking around in her underwear and appearing more feminine than the people around her, her main role is to promote the narrative. This commingling of masculinity and femininity in characters can be seen in other action films as well. Sometimes, women produce visual pleasure while dominating males around them, as in blaxploitation films like Cleopatra Jones (Jack Starrett, 1973) and Get Christie Love (William A. Graham, 1974), and as in more recent films like Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (McG, 2003) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001), other times their sexiness or beauty is secondary to their role in visceral action sequences and pushing forward the narrative. These films subvert Mulvey’s observation that men drive the narrative with the support of women. The women like Ripley overtly carry the onus of being the ideal ego. The female spectator can identify directly with the femaleness of the characters, and, as Clover establishes, the male spectator easily slips into cross-gender identification to also cathect with them. (Clover, 47). Easy cross-gender identification, and stereotypically masculine fortitude and action scenes, are what make Lara Croft and Charlie’s Angels able to also act as ideal egos, even when shrouded in sexier coding.

Aliens is an experiment in cross-gendering. It takes stereotypically gendered elements, like gun-toting, fear, and affection, and exposes similarities and differences in the ways men and women shoulder them. Differences in the ways the sexes handle normalization in a mixed-gender group are subtextualized, as evidenced by the masculinized women and feminized men. As a leitmotif of the film, alienation also plays a major role in that its dissolution directly results from the sharing of feelings and participation in group activities. As Ripley engages in combat and her affections for Newt and Hicks are revealed, she increasingly becomes the member of a group of survivors. Through the support of the group, she matures from a scared Final Girl into a woman and ideal ego, in whom stereotypically feminine attributes are tempered by strength and a maternal role in a family. The turning point of this is when she battles the alien queen. By defeating her, Ripley transforms herself and Newt by nabbing security for herself and her family.

In slasher flicks, the key to the survival of the Final Girl may be her perfervid yen for belonging.

WORKS CITED

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Film
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP) 1992.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988).

The MPW program is interesting. I recommend everyone to try it. Here I'm dropping a few paragraphs I spun there. Unfortunately, most of my writing isn't IMD safe, so all you get are excerpts...and these might be too strong for some (so, caution!).

I invite comments, and hope I haven't bothered anyone too much :)

Continue reading "Excerpts" »

I too am straddling a Jello-fence.

Continue reading "Mad Libs Assignment" »

1. An area of interest you've identified.

Cybernetics.

Continue reading "Part Deux of Jack's Self-Exegesis" »

Lift Off

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Another rough thing or two...

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A rough...

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Not "Retaliating to the Anticipatory: The Looking Glass," I blogged my "Looking Glass" a while back in order to get feedback for a script I wanted to write. Then, after several hours, I remembered that JB had a current project named "The Looking Glass." To avoid some conflict-weirdness, I deleted my blog.

But, our stories were written at different times, in different genres, and in different voices...so read on:

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At last!

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We've seen artists paint with light in urban landscapes, but not so much with sound. Highly directional sound emitters have been used in exhibits, like Holosonic’s Audio Spotlights were at the Epcot Center years ago (http://www.holosonics.com/PR_Epcot.html), but I haven’t yet seen attempts at using sound to paint a space with such devices.

I would be interested in seeing if we can incorporate Audio Spotlights with haptic interfaces to enable people to collude in generating an auditory atmosphere in an urban space.

One plausible technique would be to install motion detectors in movable boxes, chairs, planters, or crates in a well trafficked space. The detectors, depending upon the movement of the boxes relative to their original placement, could wirelessly broadcast their change in position to a PC, which in turn would modulate the sounds/music projected into the space.

I believe that equipment similar to Audio Spotlights is rentable.

It'd be cool to watch a movie or listen to music and have it's mood adjust with mine. Why can't I increase a flick's gore level like I can in games...or better yet, just subtly adjust the way eyes, voice, etc. are presented?

I wanna see a game where the aspirations of characters are changed by their environs...including the behaviors of others.

What does a smile, a frown, a smirk or a moue represent in different cultures and contexts?

Continue reading "Wisps of Thought I Had Prior to Coming Here...and Some Recently Arisen" »