Materialist Worldbuilding
March 21st
12:00 Lectures + Conversation
hosted by Wolfram Vandenbergen
14:00 Lunch
15:00 Workshop (requires registration)
19:00 Public presentation
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.