DESCRIPTION    
The CyberHouse game plan is to explore perception, production, and dissemination of visual cultural practices in terms of inclusion and exclusion from power and privilege. “Rooms” are assembled from the choices players make. The "player" can chose to buy a product (its production history is revealed as an animation during the selection process), or plant a tree, for instance, thus creating a room from the player's choices. Fragments of actions form a cohesive story for each player. The choices or actions inform the game’s text with the subjectivity of the players. This is the first segment of the game, i.e., making choices that result in environments that represent participants’ worldviews.
  The game involves finding, losing, and finding oneself again, differently, through counter-hegemonic practices that draw upon visual culture as the societal practices to decode and recode. Such referentiality, conjugations, and riffs on visual culture knowledge are the ploys in the interactive animations we are developing to guide individual and collective constructions of worldviews in CyberHouse.
    The labels in CyberHouse layered on the participants’ worlds probe into their choices and encourage players to remove uniformity and create difference in societal norms. The labels ask about the inequalities in the perception, production, and distribution of visual knowledge. To “win,” so to speak, is to rid one’s environment or room of damaging labels. It is impossible to do this alone. Change occurs through consensus, collaboration, and collective activity.
       
Players upload a self-representation and see an animation of their representation entering a breathing house, a metaphor for body. The mirror asks: “How do you see yourself? How would you like others to see you?”  
The animation ends and the representation is reflected on a mirror in the house’s foyer. As the participant moves, the reflection moves correspondingly, but there is one variation that disrupts what appears to be natural.
 

Clicking on the reflection’s center portion exposes five different ways to understand center (e.g., subjectivity, core, essence, power, inclusion) in three different environments (womb, closet, and sky). Clicking on the peripheral of the reflection provides entry into three other environments. The six environments will have several short animations in them that offer choices to participants that in turn, according to their choices, construct their worlds from which they interact with each other to remove cultural codes (i.e., labeling). These environments include:
1. womb emphasizing autobiography and self-esteem
2. closet with a focus on identity formation and enculturation
3. sky connoting imagination and symbiotic relationships
4. a shopping environment that concerns consumption and body image
5. a scene of group interaction focused on human relationships
6. a space of nature that symbolizes transformative power
A Penn State College of Arts & Architecture grant awarded for 2004-2005 provides partial funds to pay programmer, Kumar Desai, to design the MySQL database programming. I will conceptualize and coordinate the database to function with the FLASH animations created by me into a website I design. Ovid Boyd, my 22 year-old son from Oregon, and Hui-Chun Hsiao from Taiwan will assist in creating the animations during the Summer and Fall of 2004.
        Karen Keifer-Boyd © 2004