Paper short abstract:

Based on research conducted in a virtual world this paper discuss the use of machinimas - cinematic production created through real time 3D computer animation engines - as a promising technique of obtaining, presenting and interpreting ethnographical data.

Paper long abstract:

Besides to live their second life and interacting, many Second Life residents produce materials, such as photographs and films, based on their experiences in this virtual world. The production of films using videogame's software or hardware and other real-time 3D graphics programs is called machinima. Our purpose in this paper is to discuss the epistemological aspects of using machinimas in anthropological research as a technique to collect and interpreting ethnographic data, and also to share our experience in machinima filmmaking as a way of entering the field and interact with our research interlocutors. Furthermore, in addition to understand machinima as an effective instrument of research, we intend to claim that machinimas can be incorporated as a final form of presentation of research data in visual anthropology .This proposal has significant implications in relation to new narrative forms and mechanisms of creation that problematize the boundaries between fiction and documentary, destabilizing dichotomies as reality / fiction and objectivity / subjectivity. For this purpose, we will take as inspiration the reflections of Jean Rouch on the relationship between anthropological knowledge and aesthetic production; on the question of authorship through the camera-eye of the anthropologist and his voice as narrator. In this case, the research in virtual worlds depends on the construction of the researcher's avatar, which means his visual representation in the digital world. Therefore, the production of the avatar is also a visual work, while authorial and collective and, for the anthropologist, a new kind of research tool.