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.

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?

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).