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).  

‘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.