ARIA Residency: EARTH ENGINE

MGLC, Pod turnom 3, 1000 Ljubljana
09 – 31 August 2024

Related events (as part of ARIA, Worlds’ End Hackathon programme):

18 August, 5 pm, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana / Talk all the world’s polygons
19 – 23 August, Krušče / Closed-door workshop for the participants of ARIA Real Game Play (applications are now closed)

During the residency in Ljubljana, Alice Bucknell will continue developing Earth Engine, a video game and research project exploring planetary play.

The game uses real-time climate data to respawn a speculative Earth every time it is played. It builds on the emerging lore of EVEs (Earth Virtualization Engines), digital Earth twins put forward as the future of climate research. Rejecting the idea of more data = more reality, Earth Engine triangulates ideas of posthuman play, ecological reworlding, and planet as player. Inverting typical game mechanics and distinction between player and environment, here the Earth becomes the player, and the human an NPC.

Earth Engine builds upon several of Bucknell’s long-term research interests, including the interrelation of gaming and ecological thinking, video games as affective interfaces for understanding complex forms of knowledge, and the paradox of predictive technologies in foreclosing other possible futures.

Colophon

Production: Projekt Atol Institute
In collaboration with: ŠUM journal
Co-production: International Center for Graphic Arts (MGLC)
Supported by: The Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, the City of Ljubljana – Department of Culture.

ARIA residency is organized within the More-than-Planet project and is co-funded by the European Union as part of the Creative Europe framework.

ARIA residency for artists and writers complements the ARIA summer school. It hosts authors whose practice is informed by speculative and worldbuilding approaches, and draws from an expanded field of culture, history, and science to explore the ways and tools of “imagineering” the planet in a time of its changing ecology.

Bio

Alice Bucknell is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their recent work has
focused on creating cinematic universes within game worlds, exploring the affective
dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations
and forms of knowledge. Their work has appeared internationally at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade
Seoul, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Gray Area in San Francisco, Singapore
Art Museum, and Serpentine in London, among others. Their writing appears in
publications including ArtReview, e-flux architecture, frieze, Flash Art, the Harvard
Design Magazine, and Mousse.

In 2024, they are a grantee of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine
Arts, recipient of the Collide Residency at CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary, and
artist-in-residence at EPFL’s Enter the Hyper-Scientific research residency program in
Lausanne. Bucknell received a MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College
of Art and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. They are currently
faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.

Alice Bucknell