Toward a Minor Tech:Fartan

Rendering Worlds

A Research Agenda for the Cartographing of Computational Worlding Practices

Author: Teodora Sinziana Fartan

Keywords: worlding, algorithmic storytelling, container model, virtual elsewheres, critical rendering

Abstract:

This paper formulates a strategic activation of the artistic practice worlding by setting up a research agenda to map its open-ended entanglements of practices and processes spanning storytelling, computational code, fiction, data flows, networked processes, virtual architectures, mysticism and ecological thinking. Through the integration of LeGuin’s container model with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a ‘minor literature’ and Anna Tsing's theory of scale, an investigation into the multidisciplinary theoretical underpinnings of worlding practices is launched, with particular attention to how of the affordances of software can challenge dominant narratives and offer alternative scales of engagement. By exploring the intersections of these frameworks and their implications, an initial mapping of how worlding operates as a multi-faceted, critical and anti-colonial storytelling practice is envisioned.

1. In Search of Virtual Elsewheres

Imagine an empty grid. A flicker. One single coloured pixel appears. Bytes are stirring. Imagine more and more pixels blinking to life, filling the plane, melting into arrays. A three dimensional mesh emerges, amorphous. A raw scaffold. In an electrically-charged, networked order of here and there, affection makes way where vision cannot. Inputs call out to outputs; data streams flow in the two-way traffic of the interface. So long as the algorithm is processing, an Elsewhere opens.

What does it mean to ‘world’ an instance of a world? To think it, to carefully plot it out,  then render it alive and, finally, entangled in its web of relations, feel it through the affordances of its interfaces? What kind of entanglements of practices, philosophies and technologies need to be activated in order to conjure such complex imaginaries, where new scales of engagement operate? The possible answers to these questions will most likely be, themselves, intricate webs of philosophies, practices and techniques, bound together by mystical energy - this paper, therefore, sets out to formulate a research agenda for the exploration of such answers, aiming to situate worlding as a complex artistic practice traversing storytelling, computational code, fiction, data flows, networked exchanges, virtual architectures, mysticism and ecological thinking. By opening up such a process of mapping, this text aims to activate the term ‘worlding’ within the context of the computational affordances involved in the immersive, relational and affective rendering of a world instance.