networked worlds

The first recorded use of ‘worldbuilding’ was in an issue of the Edinburgh Review , December 1820.

The magic of the internet is that it lets us build whole new societies on top of the existing one. These new, internet-led societies have repeatedly shown the power to evolve, push, and even overtake the physical society that created them (for good and for ill).

Any study of worldbuilding would be remiss without mention of Biosphere 2, the experimental facility constructed in Arizona for studying the feasibility of life in a manmade ecosystem. In 1994, Abigail Alling and Mark Van Thillo broke into the complex – or rather, attempted a break-out, and in the process brought the years-long experiment to an... See more

4/ The internet is rewiring not only the media sector (as with streaming) but the public itself, which is breaking up, or being broken, into multiple — some say parallel — realities.

As you can tell from my attempt to describe it, we do not have a good language for this shift.

If art has a duty, it is to render visible the conditions in the world which are ubiquitous but otherwise invisible. You see where I’m going here. If you want to make an artwork depicting a person, you would do well to use oil paint, a technology that, like human flesh, absorbs and refracts light, and can be pulled taut across the canvas or else... See more

I should also reiterate here that my work is absolutely not trying to future-cast a singular vision or offer immediate solutions to the present, which is an impossible and dangerous brand of solutionism that we know well enough already from the technosolutionists in Silicon Valley. Rather, I’m using speculation to expand the atlas of shared... See more

Reality as we understand it is a phenomenon of social structures, language, and shared processes for engaging with the world. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

These historical patterns show us it is entirely human to turn to the supernatural, conspiracy, spiritualism and the occult in our effort to make sense of how new technology and media might change us, both individually and collectively. It is one big cope, to regain a sense of control in a time of uncertainty and difficulty.