Materialist Worldbuilding
March 21st
12:00 Lectures by Finn and Elbe
+ Conversation hosted by Wolfram Vandenbergen
14:00 Lunch
15:00 Workshop by Elbe
RSVP: contact_aujus@proton.me
19:00 Reading & Drinks
A world to be; a materialist look at World building within Capitalism
It is a world of competing realities, a real of competing worlds and spheres of influence. A dice roll away from being noticed, from being forgotten, from crushing every single fiber out of your body, from loving you wholly. Worlds that destroy, worlds that create and connect. To speculate about kinds of worlds, the practice of world building, creating narratives about what could be is to be connected to the fundamental building blocks of power and material evolutions.
Creating self-deconstructing worlds on its way to complete deterritorialization, the world of capital. Creating soothing human Utopia’s, land of stable symbols. Creating impossible worlds, the domino towers of Communism. All worlds could be real and could take any form, yet world building as a practice today finds itself curtailed and formed by the world and world building practice of capital. Thus we turn to Marxism, to understand how world building is framed and controlled by a free market economy, to lift the hood of ‘financial wording’ and see its devilish mechanics.
Marxism is not, I would claim, a world building practice as such, it does not propose new realities, although through Marxism new realities are produced. Marxism has always been a method, a tool to examine how the world is build, a manual, a system of analysis, concepts and poetics. A basic question but fundamental: “How did this thing get here?” This coffeecup, this glass frame, these people, with their specific clothes. Marxism is also a radar for human suffering, pain and failure. In this coffeecup, there is embedded human labor, hidden inside the commodity ghosts are roaming: someone crying, sirens cutting through morning commute, being sick, being fired, being killed, being moved about, roads, seas, air, forced into the straightjacket of logistics, cut down the forests, burn the fields, poison all the streams, we just want one more ride to make it big.
World building is a very lucrative business, ripe for appropriation and value extraction by capital. Yet capital this famous eater of worlds, produces itself a myriad of narratives, myths and rules assembling a bigger world of its own. How should we understand this relation between world creation and world extraction? Marxism should help us in this work of decoupling world building from value production, repurposing it for other uses and safe guarding its critical potential. Simultaneously we should be able to identify capitalists own world building techniques.Through this lecture and workshop we will experiment with world building from a Marxist/Materialist perspective, inviting others to make worlds together.
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Traces of Happiness: Building Worlds Within and Beyond Capitalism
by Finn Dawson
This lecture examines the historical, theoretical and practical dimensions of worldbuilding and its close relationship to capitalist social relations. It starts by outlining the origins of worldbuilding and its historical precedents in the utopian, science fictional, realist and fantastical traditions, before examining how it is heavily implicated in late capitalism. It looks towards videogames as a primary medium through which worldbuilding is performed, discussing how Intellectual Property (IP) and the ludic form of videogames warps worldbuilding to be a process of property consolidation and capital accumulation. Finally, this lecture speculates on what radical forms of worldbuilding may look like: ways of envisioning alternate pasts, presents and futures.
Finn Dawson is a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney researching videogames, worldbuilding and capitalist social relations. He uses methods from critical theory, media studies, political economy and literary theory to analyse the ideological underpinnings of videogame worlds. He has written and spoken on labour, automation, worldbuilding, interfaces and mediation.
World Building Assignments
by Elbe Trakal
WBA is a series of poetic exercises to consider world-building through a materialist pedagogy. An introductory lecture will present the project and its premises.
Followed by a writing workshop that will use some of the assignments as writing exercises to build a collective world together. This workshop is open to all (registration is required).
Positioning the question of political subjectification against the backdrop of an always already ideological totality of World, the project argues for a materialist pedagogical program to co-constitutively shapes worlds and subjects through collective literary practice. Half writing prompt, half protest letter WBA asks how world-building is politically feasible, and what kind of subject it may produce. The work aims to transpose various methods of constructing and dreaming worlds from science fiction to utopic fiction, from science studies to future studies, while it argues against worlding pessimisms such as Jack Halberstam’s concept of unworlding. Consider it a poetic arsenal of questions, or an examination of built worlds with an anarchist stethoscope. This is a work in progress developed as part of my Magical Materialism series shown at Gegenwarten, Chemnitz; Mocvara, Zagreb; Blend & Bleed Symposium.
Elbe Trakal has an interdisciplinary practice that encompasses films, games, performance and literature. Their collaborative and research-based works confront the subjective aspects of neoliberal extraction and capitalist dispossession. Trakal is a Ph.D. candidate at the Art University in Linz, where they are working on post-socialist subjectification in East Germany. They are co-founder of Mimesis - Cinema as Performance Magazine, Xenoverse - a science fiction and theory study group, and fat vampire press.
The workshop requires registration.