Hacking Worldbuilding

Speculative and imaginary worlds can serve for experimenting with new modes of living. By incorporating diverse historic and political perspectives, including ecological and non-human actors, these practices make use of high resolution real-time engines allowing the creation of worlds that hack hegemonic systems and generate storyboarding for alternative futures. Hacking Worldbuilding brings artists, designers and theorists to explore the ways in which their speculative work blurs with reality as a generative act of creation and critique.

Alice Bucknell is an artist, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. Their work explores the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge.

Through her creative work, Miriam Hillawi Abraham works to decipher and conserve oral histories and disappearing knowledge systems from across the Continent, striving for their continuation into the digital future. Design is ultimately a mechanism of self-affirmation. A method of driving preferable futures and worldviews. And as Blackness has been historically banished to the margins, the realms of the exotic, the unknown and unknowable, the politics of design and space making emboldens us to reinforce Black subjectivity and claim uncharted territories asserting and centring ourselves in multiple futures.

Eunjo Lee is a London-based digital artist whose work explores the ecological interconnectedness of various entities, ranging from humans and nature to objects and concepts. By drawing on theoretical frameworks that integrate ecological consciousness with relational vitality, she employs mythological elements to re-evaluate human ontological positioning, emphasising the unique role of digital art in depicting these complex relationships.

Flora Weil is a designer, engineer, and artist whose works focus on exploring new narratives around the development of emerging technologies. She also co-runs the interactive media studio Nephila with Alexander Taylor, an evolving collective of people and technologies building experimental projects focused on open-source tools, worldbuilding, cybernetic systems, design engineering, and ecology.

Image: (Left to right) Lullaby of the Ruins - Eunjo Lee, Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus - Miriam Hillawi Abraham, Earth Engine - Alice Bucknell, Design in Rising Winds, Flora Weil

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Host or Publisher AA Public Programme