Toward a Minor Tech:Fartan

Rendering Minor Worlds

A Research Agenda for the Cartographing of Computational Worlding Practices

Author: Teodora Sinziana Fartan

Bio:

Teodora Sinziana Fartan (b. 1995) is a researcher, computational artist and writer based in London, UK. Her research-artistic practice explores the new spaces of possibility opened up by collaborations between software and media, with a particular focus on the new modes of relational and affective experience rendered into being by the networked data exchanges facilitated by interfaces and algorithmic flows. Driven by speculative storytelling, Teodora’s practice explores the immersive, interactive and intelligent more-than-human entanglements taking shape within algorithmically-mediated spaces.

Teodora is currently a PhD Researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, as well as a Lecturer at the University of the Arts London. Keywords: worlding, algorithmic storytelling, critical rendering, container model, envisioning, minor worlds

Abstract

Introduction

The contours of an emergent techno-artistic practice that is concerned with the critical intersection of software and speculative storytelling are becoming visible within the landscape of contemporary new media art: in the midst of late techno-capitalism, artists are dislodging existing hi-tech systems and platforms from their conventional roles and repurposing them as technologies of possibility that seek to de-center the master narratives of the Western imagination. Practices of worlding materialise, therefore, as portals into fictional terrains where alternative modes of being and knowing are envisioned; they refuse a totalising view of the megastructure of the capitalistic imaginary and instead zoom in onto the cracks appearing along its edges, where other narrative possibilities are starting to sprout and multiply. Through the evocative affordances of algorithms, they teleport us forwards, amidst the ruins of the Anthropocene, “where unexpected alliances emerge from the debris of what has passed” (Tsing).

In what follows, I aim to at once activate a cartography of ‘worlding’ as an emergent, algorithmically-driven artistic praxis and propose a tentative politics of worlding by situating it as a practice of resistance that critiques the present through the conjuring of a radically different mode of existence from the techno-scientific rational imaginary of late capitalism - one that, I argue here, also proposes a new aesthetic mode rooted in the procedural and generative affordance of computation and the complex relations that it enables. Looking through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of a minor literature, we can trace an emergence of minor worlds as potent and powerful assemblages countering the majority worlds enabled by capitalist platforms and master narratives - what can these minor worlds reveal about more-than-human collaborations and the critical role of technology within speculative practices? How do they become operative as instruments for decentering the master narratives of our present ? What alternative knowledges do they cultivate and what potentialities are opened up for encountering these?

Throughout this paper, the worlds conjured by artists such as Ian Cheng, Sahej Rahal, Jena Sutela, Lawrence Lek, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Larry Achiampong will constitute objects of analysis for how worlding at once becomes operative as a form of critique and activates a process critical ‘future-making’ as defined by Montfort (13), where acts of imagining the future have the potential to feed into its materialisation.

On Worlding as Algorithmically-mediated Practice

Today, there seems to be a widespread view that we are living at the end - of liberalism, of capitalism, of Planet Earth, of civilization; engulfed in the throes of late capitalism, conjuring a possible alternative seems almost out of grasp. To reference the fraught mode of existence of our present, I’ll draw on William Gibson’s statement from ‘Pattern Recognition’:

"We have no idea of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our parents had a future, or thought they did. For us things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition..." (200)

Gibson  refers here to the difficulty of imagining a future in a present that is marred by ecological, political and social unrest. Similarly to today, asymmetrical power structures, surveillance capitalism and the threat of climate change deeply complicate our ability to think of a future.

So, what comes after the end of the world? Or what can exist outside the scaffolding of the world as we know it, dominated by asymmetric power structures, infused with injustice, surveilled by ubiquitous algorithms and continuously subjected to extractive practices? As Mark Fischer notes when claiming that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than that of capitalism” (1), casting one’s imagination into a future that refuses the master narratives of capitalism is no easy feat. To think outside ourselves, towards possible future alternatives, becomes a difficult exercise.

Worlding attempts to intervene precisely at this point and open up new formats of relational and affective exploration of modes of being otherwise. As Shaws and Reeves-Evison propose when addressing fiction as practice: ‘far from being an escape from the world, fiction takes us to its symbolic centre and might allow us to establish some leverage within the tangled contingencies and hidden conventions that lie there.’ (7). Thinking speculatively with algorithmic renderings, can, therefore, allow us to think beyond the master narratives of the present and envision the possibilities that lay there in affectively-charged ways.

Moreover, in the wake of the Anthropocene, feminist critical theory has long called for experiments in imagining modes of being otherwise - from Stenger’s bid to cultivate “connections with new powers of acting, feeling, imagining and thinking” (24), to Palmer’s vision of abandoning “habitual temporalities and modes of being”() in favour of radical speculation, Haraway’s request for authorial attention to “what worlds world worlds” () or LeGuin’s plea for a search for the ‘other story’, an alternative to the linear, cyclical narratives recirculated perpetually within the history of narrative, we can trace the emergence of a collective utterance, an incantation resonating across feminist epistemologies that foregrounds contemporary experiments in thinking otherwise.

Particularly, in the case of worlding, imagining otherwise takes shape within a more-than-human entanglement with technologies that are capable of procedurally rendering a simulation or a glimpse into an alternative mode of being.  Worlding makes use of algorithmical processes and tools such as game engine technologies or machine intelligence to envision a radically different mode of existence from that dictated by the cultural narratives of capitalism - through the decentering of the master narratives of our present, practices of worlding draw on alternative sources of knowledge in order to speculatively engage with the uneven landscape of the future, its multiplicities and many textures and viscosities.