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 situating of worlding as a practice engaged with the contemporary networked condition and its integration with LeGuin’s container model, 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.

I. Introduction

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. 

Algorithmic renderings of possible worlds are increasingly emerging today as a critical storytelling practice concerned with the conjuring of portals into virtual elsewheres: fictional terrains where alternative modes of being and knowing are envisioned. Materialising through the data exchanges of networked algorithmic structures, these speculative imaginaries enmesh new possibilities for agency and embodiment within the inexhaustible capacity of the virtual. This paper formulates a strategic activation of the term 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.

This is, therefore, a study of “what worlds make worlds'', as Haraway puts it (12), of what new imaginative ontologies become possible on the shores of virtual terrains. What kind of seeds grow into virtual cosmologies, and how?

This paper argues that technological scale sets ideal conditions for the emergence of computational life worlds, enabling these ontological experiments to exist as immersive continuums of data exchanges through their real-time processes. Moreover, it contends that these critical renderings of speculative virtual imaginaries are increasingly emerging today as a form of collective utterance, a minority language that responds to the current states of emergency that we find ourselves in socially, politically, ecologically and technologically. This recent crystallisation of worlding as an immersive, experiential storytelling practice situates itself within the political context of resistance through its yearning for modes of being-otherwise that seek, as Stengers urges us, to imagine “connections with new powers of acting, feeling, imagining, and thinking” (24) and then prototype, develop and render these into being.

A question, therefore emerges: how can we position and conceptualise these novel modes of expression that operate within the scales of virtual spaces and their underlying networks of exchange? How can practices of worlding enable us to abandon “habitual temporalities and modes of being”, as Helen Palmer puts it, and think beyond ourselves, speculatively, towards possible futures and fictions?

II. On Worlding

Before we move any further into this exploration, the contested nature of the term ‘worlding’ needs to be addressed - both ‘worlding’ and its close etymological relative ‘worldbuilding’ surface within different (and often disparate) academic disciplines, contexts and practices. Particularly the latter, a highly prevalent term within fantasy fiction, games design and creative writing disciplines, tends to revolve around exhaustive how-to approaches to constructing a fantastical universe, that often view the structuring of a world as a process of conquering, as LeGuin agrees (7).

‘Worldbuilding’, in its current mode of existence, often refers to an extensive authorial process that aims to ascribe reasoning to all aspects of a fictional world, in order to increase the audience’s sense of perceived realism; it often follows the belief that when a fictional world is perfectly conceptualised, the audience should have no gaps left to fill in relation to its ontological structure. Darko Suvin emphasises the process of world-building as beginning with a “fictional (‘literary’) hypothesis and develop[ing] it with totalizing (‘scientific’) rigour” (6). This rigorous world-building is also central to the literary tradition of fantasy and science fiction, in which “an alternative society is described in totalizing detail” (Cuffman, 3). This cementation of a perspective focused on logical realism, has, in turn, resulted in the production of exhaustive lists, sets of questions and templates for an author to answer when devising a possible world, in order to clarify its context and improve its sense of realism - a never-leave-any-stone-unturned type of practice emerges here, which aims to encapsulate and quantify this process of fleshing out a world until it feels sufficiently ‘real’ to those coming into contact with it.

The complication I highlight here is that the definition of the ‘real’, as well as the mode to attain this perceived ‘realism’, becomes hinged on a particular perspective of totality and an accompanying set of specified methods, which  often result in the generation of cookie-cutter patterns for thinking worlds through. Similarly to Virgina Woolf’s botulism that LeGuin draws on (2), a confined space of the imagination is starting to take shape, which steadily ferments a noxious narrative. A problematic practice, therefore, arises through the tendency to apply the rule-sets and protocols of this approach to worldbuilding to all fictional practices. Through its quantification of process and its attempt to establish master strategies for maximum realism, this generalised application of worldbuilding functions to produce “closed-network, rockstar-isms that separate forms that are otherwise matrixed, networked, open” (Scavo, 2). Whilst leaving little to nothing for a reader to envisage could hold some sort of practicality within various strands of fiction, it is also an approach that evades critical and imaginative engagement with a holistic, multi-faceted process of world-making. As Kenndey points out, “you can find any number of well-intended world-building guides which say, menacingly, something like ‘Always start with a map and a timeline’”(1), prefiguring a defined format to go about making a world: a correct pattern, a best practice, a guaranteed to succeed method - all chillingly reminiscent of LeGuin’s Ape Man, these protocols result into a master narrative of their own.

Furthermore, in the etymological sense, the compounding of the word ‘building’ onto that of ‘world’ serves to further complicate matters - ‘building’, which can also be understood as ‘forming’, ‘manufacturing’, ‘producing’, ‘erecting’ or ‘constructing’ carriers with it the traces of colonial and extractive practices of terraforming and industrialisation, which are put into practice through the attempt of streamlining and strategizing the fabrication of worlds; this circles back to LeGuin and the idea of a story as something “to conquer” (7), of an imaginative space as something to overcome, quantify, compartmentalise and then “build” according to a master plan. Moreover, this is darkly reminiscent of the role of worldbuilding played as a colonial strategy within early modernity, where “explorers and colonialists built their own worlds, using what ancient authors and Renaissance navigators had to say to invent new maps of very old worlds'' (Kalvey, 3).  Through their attempts to impose a world model over an existing reality, the practice of worldbuilding was heavily used within the colonialist struggle to ‘build’ new social orders - as Kalvey points out, “exploration and colonialism, both of which exploded during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are evidently related to world-building” (1), through their use cosmological imaginations as justifications for colonial practices.

Such a terminology, therefore, not only becomes politically problematic, but also constricts the practice of worldbuilding to an activity of assembling or compiling - this is an approach that is literally interpreted the context of video games and digital design, where the notion of worldbuilding is oftentimes directly interpreted as the labour of assembling digital objects into a more complex three-dimensional scene, and the world reduce to the visual or volumetric complexity of the backdrop.

But what of symbolic meanings and metaphors? What of the possibilities for the visitors of these worlds to infer, speculate or derive? What of the conceptual, philosophical, algorithmic processes that surround the building blocks of narrative and their presumed clarity? What of processes that, rather than aiming to impose, structure and uphold a master plan, are open-ended, matrixed and inclusive? Who chooses what a ‘complete’ world is, and to which extent does fiction need to be explained, or ‘built’ ?

I propose, therefore, to dispense with the prefix ‘building’ and its colonial legacy and suggest the use of the term ‘worlding’ instead for addressing those active processes of virtual speculation that are guided by fluidity, open-endedness and a principal focus on affective relations, embodiment and interactive affordances, rather than concentrating on full-scale, intensive, almost-industrialised processes of building a reality. ‘Worlding’, therefore, is put forward to situate those practices that come closer to LeGuin’s “strange realism” (9) than the mimicking of the megastructures that govern our own current reality.

The alternative term proposed, ‘worlding’ is not a novel concoction - initially established by Heidegger, ‘worlding’ was introduced to be illustrative of an ongoing ontological process - ‘world’ is turned into the active ‘worlding’, therefore making the  transition from noun to verb, which in turn signals a move from passivity to activity, from world to an active process of world-making - as Watts affirms, “the ‘activity’ contained in the term ‘worlding’ expresses the energetic aliveness – the presencing of an environment that is a process in constant flux [...] The term “worlding” suggests that each environment in which we find ourselves simultaneously embraces, encapsulates and signifies our entire world of experience”.

This verbification of a noun in order illustrate an etymological transition from a passive state to an active process is further reflected in contemporary theoretical thought by other practitioners exploring the domain of speculative possibility, such as O’Sullivan and Burroughs, who propose the transition from ‘fiction’ as noun to its verb form ‘fictioning’: “by using the term fiction as a verb we refer to the writing, imaging, performing or other material instantiation of worlds or social bodies that mark out trajectories different to those engendered by the dominant organisations of life currently in existence” (1) - we can therefore identify a shift of focus surrounding speculative realism, a strategic move towards emphasising open-ended, dynamic practices that exist in constant states of becoming.

Moreover, for Heidegger, ‘worlding’ is an open negotiation without a clear cut definition - there is no universal or fundamentally superior understanding  of worlding, no master key or best practice for engaging in this process, but rather Heidegger acknowledges the open-ended nature of worlding and its multifarious character. Worlding “suggests that each environment in which we find ourselves simultaneously embraces, encapsulates and signifies our entire world of experience” (Watts) and therefore functions as an “opening of meaning” (Marx, 184); it is defined not by the specific assemblage of things, but rather by the relations existing between them, the world being understood as an “open relational context” (Singh, 217).

Furthermore, when situating the work of art, Heidegger relates this to a process of worlding, by claiming that a work of art “sets-up a world. The work holds open the open of the world”, (Heidegger, 29), therefore acknowledging the worlding possibilities of artistic experiences and artefacts, which are able to conjure possible realities with their own complex assemblages of sensations, perceptions and relations.

Since Heidegger’s analysis, the understanding of ‘worlding’ has been appropriated within many other theoretical contexts, such as to theorise colonised space (Spivak), to discuss women’s experiences of the international (Pettman) or to address the phenomenology of movement (Manning), to name a only very few examples from the term’s expansive repertoire of uses within the landscape of theoretical thought. Consequently, the term ‘worlding’ exists within a rich web of theoretical contexts and its definitions, understandings and applications as a mode of thinking vary; perhaps this is illustrative in itself of its multifaceted character and open-ness - how many worlds can be held open at once? And how many ways of experiencing the world are there?

An argument can be made here that the term worlding’s myriad uses are reflective of its nature as open-ended process - within this constellation of meanings, however, a common thread remains in the sense of worlding always being approached as an active process, as dynamic entanglement of forces concerned with either a form of world-making or one of sense-making. I’d like to move now towards a clearer delineation for the first item on the research agenda mapped in this paper, which is an activation of the term ‘worlding’, particularly as it is understood within this paper’s own theoretical constellation, where it is intertwined with techno-artistic collaborations, computational processes and the affordance of virtual imaginaries. In doing so, I’ll circle back to Heidegger and the functioning of worlds as openings of meanings, in which we are fully encapsulated, and therefore propose that we think of virtual worlds in a similar fashion: as instances of worlds where, through the affordances of the virtual (that is, through interfaces, data flows and networked protocols), we are able to be immersed and embodied in ways that allow for perceptual entanglement with that particular world; as Kathleen Stewart puts it, worlding can be seen as “an attunement to a singular world’s texture and shine” (340), an ability to envision and attune into this space of possibility, to hold open a portal into this particular cosmology.

Worlding is approached here as an open practice, with particular attention Singh’s definition of world as a relational context - I contend that the fictive spaces of the virtual, coupled with the possibilities opened by algorithmic structures, allow for the formation of complex relational webs within virtual world instances and that this relational aspect needs to be foregrounded within the process of worlding an instance of a world. It is important to further note that complexity here does not refer to a totality of meaning or extent of representation of a world, but rather suggests an affective complexity, underscored by the relations at play within a virtual world.

Taking all this into account, I propose a definition for worlding as algorithmic practice - a definition intended to be fluid and expandable:

Worlding is a sense-making exercise concerned with metabolising the chaos of possibility into new forms of order that communicate otherwise through relational structures. Worlding is the act of looking for the logic that threads a world together and then scripting that logic into a networked system of data flows that render it into being. To world with algorithms is to critically render instances of worlds where speculative alternatives to our fraught present materialise through the entanglements of immersive, interactive and intelligent technologies.

One may wonder why the choice was made not to attach another prefix or an entire word to that of worlding: why not ‘algorithmic worlding’, ‘computational worlding’ or another term illustrative of technological mediation? To offer an explanation, I’ll need to turn towards our own world and the paradigm of our contemporary condition: the ubiquity of computational technologies. These processes necessary for worlding a virtual world (spanning software, data, interfaces, hardware, algorithms, rendered entities and virtual spaces) are explicitly embedded within the human condition today; we come into contact with them daily through our interactions with our increasingly computationally-mediated reality. To engage in worlding, therefore, is, as Damani puts it, to “invoke the core dilemma of the contemporary condition: how does one live a sovereign life when more and more of it is surveilled, constrained, and monetized through the instruments of asymmetrical power structures?” - to world, therefore, requires active engagement with the human condition as it takes shape enmeshed within platform capitalism, enclosed by algorithmic super structures. I argue that today, to world implicitly involves engaging with the computational structures that are so deeply rooted in our daily existence. As Haraway anticipates when welcoming the new worlds opened up by feminist science fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, their authors were “story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” (173).

III. In Search of Virtual Elsewheres

Another vector through which the emergence of computer-mediated worlding can be traced is the notion of a virtual ‘elsewhere’ - as Berry, Kim and Spiegel theorise in their introduction to Electronic Elsewheres, “places are conjured up, experienced and produced through media” (Kim et. al., 8) - I contend here that algorithmic technologies give rise to a new typology of ‘elsewhere’ as virtual renderings of spatial relations, enabling new forms of liveness that move beyond the lively presence of television into embodiment and agency.

Virtual elsewheres, therefore, are conjured into being through acts of envisioning that are underscored by algorithmic apparatuses. As Flusser points out in his theorising of the envisioning power of technical images, computational technologies “unleashes a wholly unanticipated power of invention”:

“Images appear as no one before could ever have dreamed they would. And the photographs, films, and television and video images that surround us at present are only a premonition of what envisioning power will be able to do in the future. Only when we focus on computer-synthesised images, images of the nearly impossible because ungraspable, unimaginable, and incomprehensible, can we start to even suspect what sort of hallucinatory power is at hand.” (Flusser, 37)

Flusser speaks of the power of algorithms as hallucinatory and limitless - he anticipates the development of interactive and immersive media that moves far beyond the power of the television, whilst also recognising the abilities of algorithms for envisioning synthetic worlds. Furthermore, Flusser also speaks of the artist’s perspective, that of the “envisioner”, who stands “at the most extreme edge of abstraction ever reached, in a dimensionless universe, and they offer us the possibility of again experiencing the world and our lives in it as concrete” (38) - Flusser foresees here the future possibilities of worlding, where the artist creates a dimension from nothing, by volumetrically shaping a world and then imbues that space with affective relationality through scripted interactions, allowing for it to be experienced similarly to concrete reality. Envisioning, therefore, is proposed here as a crucial practice to the process of worlding, concerned with the technical apparatus that allows a world to be experienced explicitly.

Beyond the possibilities of media and computation, the notion of elsewhere is central to speculative fiction and any practice that aims to seek an alternative and envision it. As Carpenter notes, “for Le Guin, ‘elsewhere’ has always been a lens magnifying the vexations of our own time and place, including militarism, sexism, governance, and ecology” (1).

Le Guin positions elsewheres as politically-charged spaces where alternatives to the master narratives of Western thinking and historical practices of domination, which extend all the way into the narratives that we tell ourselves, can be contained. Le Guin attempts to challenge the narratives of domination by questioning the  predominant hero's journey narrative structure, suggesting that stories can be open-ended, meandering, and inclusive, offering a more nuanced representation of the human experience. Drawing on Woolf, who attempted a re-fashioning of the English language into a ‘new plan’, LeGuin steers away from the paralysing myth of heroism, entrapped in linear repetition, and towards a container model of storytelling, where narratives can exist in networked, distributed and non-linear ways. An understanding of worlding is proposed within this framework, as a process that ushers energy inwards, rather than outwards - the world as container, as collection of energies and entities, all linked together through the non-linear pathways of the network; LeGuin also places great emphasis on the crucial importance of the power of relationality and acknowledges the mode of existence of a story as “neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process” (7).

When addressing technology, Le Guin proposes a refiguration of it as a cultural container in itself, which in turn enables the practices of science fiction to become a fluid, open field that is formulating a strange realism, positioned to match the strangeness of reality itself. Le Guin's approach challenges the notion of technology as a tool of conquest, emphasising its potential for cultural exchange and fostering empathy. She envisions this new form of science fiction as a socially engaged practice concerned with affective intensity and focused on multiplicity and plurality. Through the container model of storytelling, she offers a compelling framework for how the role of technology as a carrier bag of cultural knowledge can operate within the domain of narratives. By viewing technology as a vessel for envisioning speculative alternatives, we can imbue it with cultural potency - through sowing the seeds of worlds to come within the networked spaces afforded by algorithmic processes, we can start to shape new narratives.

The container model of narrative also offers a useful mode of conceptualising a story that is networked and rendered through algorithmic processes. Such worlds radically move away from a linear model of narrative presentation and into a networked format, where relationality, as LeGuin also contends, becomes the central mode of affective transmission. A world therefore becomes a cultural vessel, an information recipient that materialises a virtual elsewhere, where meaning is distributed amongst digital entities and data flows.

This paper, of course, could be considered its own form of container, of theoretical knowledge and reflections, that hopefully may lead to contemplation of how algorithms can make worlds, what those worlds can show us and how they can reflect back onto our own contemporary condition.  I therefore add to my research agenda, or recipient, another entry: that of the container model, which prompts a quest for new possible forms of affective transmission.

IV. Versions and Visions

The final, shorter part of this paper, will focus on connecting worlding to a political immediacy.