Speaker

Washington D.C. January 30, 2016
Digital dress-up dolls and the death of KiSS

From 2001 to 2005, I made digital dress-up dolls using the Kisekae Set System (aka KiSS). I was part of a unique community of doll makers, many of them teenage girls like me. We used complex tools and created interactive scripts for our dolls, but most of us saw KiSS as an artistic, not technical, community. We sometimes talked about "coding" or "scripting", but never "programming". Today KiSS dolls are considered relics of the past, but did KiSS necessarily have to die? I would like to talk about what might have been, if community members had felt empowered to improve the open-source tools on which we depended.