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 data 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 and a Lecturer at the University of the Arts London.
Keywords: worlding, algorithmic storytelling, critical rendering, minor worlds, container model
Abstract:
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Intoduction
The contours of a techno-artistic practice 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 an initial cartography of ‘worlding’ as an emergent, algorithmically-driven artistic praxis and propose a tentative politics of worlding by situating it as a form of resistance that critiques the present through its algorithmical 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 framework rooted in the procedural and generative affordances of computation and the complex networked relations that it produces. 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 software 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 and Larry Achiampong will be proposed as objects of analysis for the ways in which worlding at once becomes operative as a form of critique and activates a process critical ‘future-making’ as defined by Montfort (13), where potent acts of imagining the future have the potential to feed into its materialisation.
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. William Gibson’s statement from ‘Pattern Recognition’ describes the fraught present condition with surprising accuracy: "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. " (200)
Gibson makes reference here to the near-impossibility of imagining a future in a present that is marred by ecological, political and social unrest. This statement can be applied to our own contemporary context, where asymmetrical power structures, surveillance capitalism and the threat of climate change deeply complicate our ability to think of a possible future.
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 our those 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.
The world-experiments that emerge from these algorithmic worlding processes constitute hybrid assemblages of simulated spaces, fictive narratives, imagined entities and networked entanglements. Positioning themselves as counter-mythologies to the crises and anxieties of our current Anthropocentric moment, the speculative futures proposed by these worlds are inviting collective participation in acts of envisioning.
So.. what comes after the end of the world? Or, better phrased, 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 Fisher 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, has become a difficult exercise.
Worlding attempts to intervene precisely at this point and open up new formats of relational and affective experience that become modes of being otherwise through the generative and procedural affordances of software. As Shaws and Reeves-Evison propose when addressing the instrumentalization of 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). In this sense, fiction is understood as a self-reflexive process where the complex underlying mechanisms of fiction become referential to its mode of existence. Following this line of thought, one may ask, what would the symbolic centre of worlding look like?
Beyond defining worlding as a practice that makes use of algorithmic processes to envision a simulation of a world, I want to address here the open-ended nature of the possible formats through which the process of worlding, or a world instance, can be encountered: whilst many worlding experiments initially unfold as immersive game spaces or, machinima (“animated filmmaking within a virtual 3D environment” (Marino 1)), many of these worlds frequently generate supplementary, satellite artefacts that their algorithmic means of production further allow, manifesting, for example, as networked interactive installations or physical renditions of born-digital artefacts (such as sensor-based systems or sculptural 3D printed objects), as seen in the work of Keiken or Sahej Rahal; they may also feature intelligent systems and agents, such as Ian Cheng’s implementation of AI in ‘BOB (Bag of Beliefs)’, or even employ AI as a the main generative methodology, as demonstrated in Sutela’s sonic explorations of alien languages. I would like to propose, therefore, an open-ended definition for what kinds of mediated forms can reference worlds - from gamespace environments to sonic resonances or interactive assemblages, the common denominator of all these artefacts does not lie in their media specificity but rather their software ontology. I propose, therefore, that the symbolic centre of worlding, as understood within the context of contemporary techno-artistic practices, is software, and more precisely, that centre takes a form, albeit abstract: the network. As Tara McPherson suggests “computers are themselves encoders of culture” (36) structuring not only representations but also epistemologies. What kind of knowledges are encoded in these emergent software worlds?
As Munster suggests in her discussion of networks, this thread can be further explored through reflective and analytical engagement with what she calls “the patchiness of the network field” (2), or the uneven and relational connections at play within the conceptualisation of a network. Munster further proposes the concept of a network anaesthesia as a sort of state of complacency that our consciousness tends to slide in, where the our attention is being engulfed by the perceived infinity and intricacy of the scales of overlapping connections - this sensorial overload ultimately acts as a veil, cloaking the multiplicity and unevenness that marks the relationality of a specific network. In order to attempt to engage with a networked system, Munster proposes that:
“We need to immerse ourselves in the particularities of network forces and the ways in which these give rise to the form and deformation of conjunctions— the closures and openings of relations to one another. It is at this level of imperceptible flux— of things unforming and reforming relationally— that we discover the real experience of networks. This relationality is unbelievably complex, and we at least glimpse complexity in the topological network visualisation.” (3)
Munster’s theorising of networked assemblages opens up a potent line of flight for the conceptualisation of algorithmic worlding as a process - if the centre of this practice is a network, that can in itself sustain and operate a world with several possible mediatized outputs of varying degrees of complexity, then it is crucial for an understanding of a world to attempt to understand the processes through which relations open and close and the states of flux that they enable.