[ecrea] CFP Reminder: Creating Second Lives 2011: Deadline 31 May

[Apologies for cross-posting]

*Creating Second Lives 2011: Blurring  Boundaries*
September 8th & 9th 2011
School of Creative Studies and Media, Bangor University
Conveners: Dr Eben J. Muse and Dr Astrid Ensslin
Submission deadline: 31 May 2011

The Creating Second Lives conference is a chance to explore lives lived 
in virtual worlds, electronic games, MMORPG and other parts of 
cyberspace. Following Creating Second Lives 2008: Reading and Writing 
Virtual Communities, the theme of the theme of Creating Second Lives 
2011 is the blurring of boundaries in the mixed reality of ubiquitous 
computing and augmented reality. New technologies are moving users into 
the screen (Microsoft's Kinect), making the user the screen (MIT's Sixth 
Sense), and bringing the content out of the screen into the world 
(smartphones, Layars, Wikitude). Pervasive games, Digital tourism, 
telematic art and telematic performance are only a few manifestations of 
this new set of boundaries that must alter our concepts of culture, 
gender, identity, race, nation, authority, geography, space, narrative 
and time. The distinction between second life and first life is blurring 
at an increasingly rapid rate.

We invite proposals for twenty minute papers that examine how people are 
using these technologies to cross boundaries (technical, spatial, 
temporal, cultural, social, political, linguistic, ludic, economic) 
through a range of theoretical and applied, empirical, critical, 
rhetorical, creative, economic and professional approaches.

Conference papers will be considered for subsequent publication in a 
special, themed issue of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds.

Please e-mail abstracts of 250-300 words to (e.muse /at/ bangor.ac.uk) along 
with your name, affiliation and title of paper. All queries should also 
be directed to this address. Please include in your proposal any 
technological needs.

The extended deadline for submission is 31st May 2011. Selection of 
papers will be made by 15th June.

Further information concerning the conference is available on our 
website: https://sites.google.com/site/csl20110908/