Toward a Minor Tech:Teodora-500

Rendering Minor Worlds

Critical renderings of speculative virtual imaginaries are increasingly emerging today as a form of collective utterance that responds to the current states of emergency that we find ourselves in socially, politically, ecologically and technologically. The recent crystallization of immersive worlding as an experiential storytelling practice situates itself within the political context of resistance through its search for modes of being-otherwise. Kafka writes of literature that it should “affect us like a disaster, that grieves us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone” (1904), foregrounding the affective and transformative power of storytelling - stretching forwards from his time to the present day, we see this practice of critical storytelling extended into the realm of virtual ecologies with artists like Ian Cheng, Lawrence Lek, David Blandy and Larry Achiampong, Sahej Rahal, Juan Covelli and Keiken exploring ways of critiquing our contemporary context by producing minor worlds that speculatively explore alternative narratives.

A question, therefore emerges: how can we position and conceptualize these novel modes of expression that operate within the scales of virtual game spaces and their underlying networks of exchange?

Similarly to the properties of a minor language formulated 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 deterritorializing the existing entertainment-centric and economically-driven mode of existence of immersive game productions. Within the parameters of the game engine itself, the various functionalities, interfaces and xxx of mainstream game design software are geared towards

When the majority language of the game engine is deployed into the minor territories of experiment and social critique,

Whilst Kafka conceptualizes this within the context of literature, - a majority language needs to be learned by the minority, whom deploys its syntax, rules and parameters for its experimental and .

Beyond critiquing our contemporary context and making visible possible alternatives, these worlds also create networked experiences that foreground other ways of knowing / navigating and being-in-the-world.

Allows for experimental readings - betworked - maps - a question emerges

they push beyond the transformation of given content into the appropriate form expected of major literature and into the territory of minor literature where experimental and non-linear formats that “speak first and only conceive afterwards” (), existing in networked, multi-faceted and emergent states