Toward a Minor Tech:Teodora

The Emergence of Minor Worlds: Critical Storytelling in Immersive Gamespaces

This essay aims to explore the recent crystallization of immersive worldbuilding as a critical experiential storytelling practice and to situate it within the political context of resistance and being-otherwise. In the age of ubiquitous images, artists are seeking to move beyond the flat panel of the screen and enter the space beneath it, where new architectures and networks of exchange can be activated.  Worlding, therefore, emerges as a novel mode of artistic expression that is made possible through the use of complex algorithmic technologies, able to render high-fidelity graphics, support complex interactive infrastructures and ultimately enable the construction of large-scale virtual worlds and the underlying networks that keep them alive.

Beyond algorithmic affordances, worlding is also approached here as a critical storytelling project, where the weaving together of fact and fiction serve in the creation of counter-mythologies that oppose the fraught narratives of the present. Worlding, therefore, is proposed as a mode of resistance, a critical practice which enacts openings of space, time, and consciousness into alternative imaginaries made possible on the shores of virtual worlds. To engage in practices of worlding is to abandon “habitual temporalities and modes of being” (2018), as Helen Palmer puts it, to think beyond ourselves, speculatively, towards possible futures and fictions and then to prototype, hack and develop these into living digital systems.

Stemming from the root of speculative fiction, worlding continues in the ethos of envisioning departures from hetero-centric stories of conquest and destruction, told along linear temporal axes, towards a re-figuring of storytelling as a practice that foregrounds collective experience whilst operating within non-linear and dynamic structures. In her seminal essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1986) , LeGuin calls for contemporary practices to orient themselves towards the weaving of new, “untold stories” (1986), alternatives to the anthropocentric narratives that have dominated history. Deleuze himself envisions the emergence of  ‘new weapons’, new artistic machines that might be pitched against control in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ Deleuze (1992).

The turn towards immersive world design is enabled by the recent deployment of game engine technologies towards speculative explorations and critical digital experimentation; artists are producing increasingly complex digital artifacts that allow the audience to step into an alternate space of possibility,, as seen in the works of artists such as Ian Cheng, Lawrence Lek, David Blandy and Larry Achiampong, Cao Fei or Keiken. Glitchy, speculative and boundless, numerous contemporary works that critically explore utopian visions and future worlds have started to emerge and materialize into a new artistic form. Artists are increasingly interacting with video game production techniques and translating them into an art form that allows for the experience of alternative spaces and timescales, rather than singular objects or instances of lived experience. These world-experiments allow for the creation of hybrid spaces that intersect simulated space, fictive narratives and imagined bodies.

Deleuze and Guattari begin their analysis of Kafka by wondering where to enter the work: it seems like there are is a multiplicity of entries and no exit point - no clear markings are present as to which way one should move; conversely, an interactive virtual world constructs a similar web of networked potentiality within an immersive digital ecology, where the “interactor” (Murray, 2011) moves across of web of their own devising. Furthermore, the reader of Kafka's work will need to choose an opening and map the passage they find themselves following within the work - the map will change if a different entrance is chosen, or if a different map is taken. This structure of rhizomatic possibility that Deleuze and Guattari identify as a basis of minor literature is also a central principle of operation for the networked data exchanges made possible in virtual worlds.

Game engines can be seen as constituting what Deleuze and Guattari call a “majority language” (1975), through their mode of existence as capitalistic software frameworks geared for supporting large scale entertainment industry projects. However, with the increased accessibility of gaming technologies, we see the emergence of collective efforts towards the production of “minority worlds”, game spaces where the entertainment-focused properties of commodified games are replaced with experimental assemblages and their affect constellations. These “minority worlds” are developed independently or produced within critical artistic collectives, which seek to subvert the current context of techno-capitalism and propose alternative imaginaries and modes of existence.

Similarly to the properties of a minor language isolated by Deleuze and Guattari in their analysis of Kafka’s writing (1975), today’s turn towards the production of immersive worlds as sites of alternative possibilities is starting to de-territorialize the existing, entertainment-centric and economically-focused mode of existence of immersive game productions. Critical artistic exercises in the formulation of alternative virtual imaginaries are increasingly emerging as a form of collective utterance, addressing the current states of emergency that we find ourselves in socially, politically, ecologically and technologically; beyond encapsulating and critiquing current contexts, these worlds create alternative collective experiences that foreground other ways of knowing and being-in-the-world.

Finally, the spaces enabled by game engines become experimental sites of possibility for vectors of creative expression - they push beyond the transformation of given content into appropriate form characteristic of major literature and into the territory of minor literature that “speaks first and only conceives afterwards”, existing in networked, multi-faceted and emergent states - as Kafka puts it, creators of minor worlds operate on the premise: “I do not see the world at all, I invent it” (Brod, 1948). References

References

Brod, M. (ed.). (1988) The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1910-1913. Translated by J. Kresh. New York City: Schocken

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (1986) Kafka Toward a Minor Literature. 1st edn. University Of Minnesota Press

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. and McLean, M. (1985) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: The Components of Expression. New Literary History: On Writing Histories of Literature , Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 591-608. doi: https://www.jstor.org/stable/468842

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. “Another Philosophy of Language: Machines, Assemblages, Minority.” Deleuze and Language, 2002, 174–201. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599956_8.

Murray, J. (2011) Inventing the Medium. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press

“The Art of Video Games.” Smithsonian American Art Museum. Accessed January 15, 2023. https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/games.

“V&A · Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt - Exhibition at South Kensington.” Victoria and Albert Museum. Accessed January 15, 2023. https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/videogames.