WORLDS’ END SYMPOSIUM PUBLIC PROGRAMME (LECTURES, DISCUSSIONS, SCREENING)

SCHEDULE 

Saturday, 17 August 

➤  16.00–17.00 

Round Table / The politics and pedagogies of artistic role-play as collective becoming with OMSK Social Club, Áron Birtalan, Carina Erdmann

In dialogue with Áron Birtalan, Carina Erdmann, and Omsk Social Club, the panel will highlight different methodologies and accounts of role-playing as artistic practice and tackle the political and pedagogical promise of the medium in a time marked by rising conservative politics and climate emergency. We will discuss their approach to questions of agency, identity, and collectivity, as well as their shared interest in magick, mysticism and the power of spill-overs between reality and fiction, the worlds of life and play. We will ask how role-playing can help break down entrenched ideas, norms, and anthropocentric assumptions, lay the foundations for a collective worlding practice rooted in co-creative becoming rather than individualism and prototype new ways of being and feeling in a world transformed by ecological change.  / Moderated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth.

➤  17.00–17.45 

Talk / Lukáš Likavčan: A planet of the selfless: Philosophy for habitable Earth 

In his talk Lukáš Likavčan will shed a light on his recent work, which orients planetary imaginaries towards the astronomical concept of the planet, and towards the speculative histories enabled by different solutions to Fermi paradox. This has direct implications for politics and ethics of sustainability, as it guides our discussions towards more inclusive normative concepts, such as habitability or genesity of the planetary environment.

➤  18.00–18.45 

Talk / Lucia Pietroiusti: All that remains of the changing seasons 

When we look at animals and plants, we often witness a kind of preparation upon the changing of the seasons: an evolutionary dance between weather and choice, where the very first hints of a transformation prompt a withdrawal of nutrients from leaves; the springing up of shoots and buds; the storing of foods and fats; the building of burrows and nests. In the face of transformation, our more-than-human companions may not know what lies ahead, but doubtlessly they know how to prepare for it. 

In this talk, Lucia Pietroiusti draws from her experience as a curator working across art and ecology; as well as her research and training in mourning, grief and ceremony. Accompanied by thinkers from Vanessa Machado de Oliveira to Federico Campagna and Ernesto de Martino, Pietroiusti will try to ask questions of a world that’s ending. In a time of profound transformation, what habits of mind, what stories, what rituals, may help us hold, and weather, change? What embers do we already hold of what has been? How to make space for what we may never experience? And what does art have to do with any of this? 

➤  18.45–19.30 

Q&A / Lucia Pietroiusti, Lukáš Likavčan

Moderated by Tjaša Pogačar.

Sunday, 18 August 

➤  16:00–16:30 

Talk / Tom K Kemp: Why is it leaking? Bottle universes and infernal actors. 

The afterlife, particle simulations, and youtuber terrariums can all be defined as ‘mesocosms’: reduced and sealed ecosystems that are sites of speculation, sitting between controlled and emergent behaviours. By working through game studies and various historical formalisations of hypothetical alternative societies, this talk will think about the relationship between mesocosms, the reconfiguration of the world, the formal qualities of developing and playing fictional RPG settings, and the contradictions and potentials therein.

➤  16:30–17:00 

Talk / Klara Kofen: To all the junkyards of what-ifs 

Lauren Berlant writes, “Once I called myself a utopian (…) I should have called on the heterotopian, which attends to living in the copresence of many forms of life.”   

What organisational, sensual, and affective regimes emerge when all modalities of existence are out of joint? And how can their pasts be syhnthesised with their many potential futures? Is synthesis the right mode of organisation or is a new, radically compositionist approach needed? In this talk, Klara Kofen will examine her research on the 17th-century polycrisis that coincided with the birth of many modernities, alongside her work as a creator of operas, which serve as formal, historical, organisational, and aesthetic vectors; a form of “multimodal worlding” that is translational, affective, and compositional.

➤  17:00–17:30 

Talk / Alice Bucknell: All the world’s polygons

This talk explores the history and futures of simulation in gaming, the bleed between entertainment and climate forecasting, and the paradox of predictive technologies in foreclosing other possible futures. From Stockholm, a team of 250 roams the Earth’s surface with portable scanners, making good on their promise to “capture the whole world”. In Wyoming, a supercomputer runs simulations with a gaming company’s digital Earth twin to determine whether solar geoengineering is a good idea. In Taiwan, a gamer leaves their stream running as typhoon winds pick up IRL and in the world of GTA VI. Taking place inside a game engine, All the world’s polygons anticipates the darker drive of perfect simulation while considering the affective capacities of the game engine as an animate ecosystem, one that’s capable of generating new ways of being in the world.

➤ 17.45–18.45  

Discussion / Alice Bucknell, Klara Kofen, Tom K Kemp

Moderated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth.

➤ 18.45–19.30 

Film Screening / Cécile B. Evans: Reality Or Not

Reality or Not (2023) follows a group of high school students from a suburb north of Paris who are invited by an American producer to participate in a reality TV show only to reject their own reality. Their story of radicalization is encouraged by the Producer (Evans) and narrated by their former teacher (Alexandra Stewart) as the students begin a practice of world jumping that moves the film across disparate realities. Alongside this group of young people, an eclectic array of characters construct interwoven storylines ranging from a former Real Housewives star turned hacker who attempts to take down the International Monetary Fund to a group of failed renders of a virtual influencer that unite to form a workers collective. The 35-minute film is lodged with penetrating humor to deliver cutting overviews of contemporary culture and seductive images that play a vital foil to the assault of ideas, luring audiences magnetically into the realities unfolding. “No you, no me, no storylines”.

 

WORKSHOP

Sunday, 18 August 

➤ 10.00–14.30 

Worldbuilding session DIM – a game for sightless minds and curious limbs / Áron Birtalan

As part of ARIA Worlds’ End Symposium you are welcome to join our ARIA resident and speaker Áron Birtalan on Sunday, 18 August, from 10.00–14.30 at Komuna Hall in Kino Šiška for a worldbuilding session.

DIM is an experimental game in which we as a group create a fictional ecosystem previously unheard of. This ecosystem is a dwelling for creatures, shapes, objects and other curious bodies who move and interact with one-another while never really knowing who or what it is they are encountering. Instead of crafting our world with the control and clarity of a master narrator, we will let our senses, our movement and strange voices from a set of stones take the creative lead. In a way, DIM is a mixture between a role-playing game and a movement class, while also being a parody of both things.

More info about the workshop and how to apply HERE.

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SPEAKERS’ BIOGRAPHIES

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.

Áron Birtalan is an artist, musician, and student of theology, whose work explores languages of pleasure and anguish between angel, creature, and computer. Working with relationships and sense perception as artistic materials, Áron creates guided games, mystical practices, musical releases, unruly thoughts, and hybrid publications. They received their education at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague as well as the DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam, and now pursue doctoral studies at the Stockholm University of the Arts’ Institute for Dance. Their artistic dissertation, Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come, is due in 2026.

Cécile B. Evans is an American-Belgian artist living and working in La Plaine Saint Denis. Evans’ work examines the value of emotion and its rebellion as it comes into contact with ideological, physical, and technological structures. They have previously realized new commissions at Centre Pompidou, Museo d’Arte Moderne di Bologna, Tate Liverpool, Lafayette Anticipations, Tramway, Serpentine Galleries (UK), Castello di Rivoli (IT), Museum Abteiberg (DE), and and exhibited work at Whitechapel Gallery (UK), Haus der Kunst (DE), Renaissance Society Chicago (US), Singapore Art Museum, Mito Art Tower (JP) amongst others. Evans’ films have been screened in festivals such as the New York Film Festival and Rotterdam International. Evans’ work is held in public collections such as MoMA NY (US), the Whitney Museum (US), Centre Pompidou (FR), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (DK), and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul (KR).

Carina Erdmann lives between Berlin and Brussels. She works on the intersection of game design and performance, researching role play, and collective (un)worlding as methods for critical inquiry and social speculation. She investigates improvisation, somatic scores, and dream sharing as communication technologies to re-collectivize inner struggles that are structural. In different collaborations and contexts she develops adaptive game architectures that prompt players to (de)construct collective memories, (per)form plural perspectives, and enact alternative agencies. Her current research project Distant Bodies and Accomplices is supported by different (para)academic institutions, like LUCA School of Arts, School of Commons, and a.pass, and with the communities of aujus.be, a project space collectively run through role play, in the dreamXchange discord group and on 0ct0p0s.net, a platform for prefigurative play.

Tom K Kemp employs roleplaying game design, animation and filmmaking to tell collaborative stories about complexity and the humans who constitute it. Working through the roleplaying game form to combine political simulation, fan-fiction and divination into semi-improvised group storytelling, participants are invited to parse systems, complicate common narratives, and synthesise an array of knowledges into plot, dialogue, diagram and performance. His works attempt an evocation of the emancipatory weirdness of group agency and the unintended consequences of making models of the world. He has exhibited at La Casa Encendida (ES), EYE Filmmuseum, (NL), Quad (UK) and the MKG Hamburg (DE). Residencies include Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (NL), DOGO (CH), Rupert (LT), Triangle-Astérides and Cité Internationale des Arts (FR).

Klara Kofen is an interdisciplinary artist, dramaturg and writer, based in London. She is the artistic director of Waste Paper Opera, a collective that creates sound-based intermedia works. Her work is concerned with histories, speculative, counterfactual, real and imagined and the way technological interfaces shape our relation to time and affect. Recent works include Admiror, or Revolutionary Sentiments with Bahar Noorizadeh (BEK Bergen, 2023, Medialab Matadero 2024, The Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2024), and Dead Cat Bounce – an oratorio about finance and catastrophe with Gary Zhexi Zhang (UK Tour 2024, Nottingham Contemporary, Eastside Projects, Arts Catalyst). She studied history at Glasgow and Oxford, and writing for performance at the Guildhall. Klara was born into a Greek Polish family and grew up in Düsseldorf.

Lukáš Likavčan is a philosopher focused on emerging technologies, ecology, and astronomy. He works as a researcher for Antikythera program incubated by Berggruen Institute, and he is an incoming fellow at University of Giessen’s Panel for Planetary Thinking. He also often engages as a consultant with private companies, public institutions, and NGOs such as Waag Futurelab. More info at likavcan.com.

OMSK Social Club is a stewarded and sprawling collective whose artistic practice is created between two lived worlds, one of life as we know it and the other of role play. These worlds bleed into one, creating a chasm of enquiry, that takes the form of a specific immersive methodology, they coined in 2017 called Real Game Play: collective immersion and speculative worlding. Their works invoke states and gateways that could potentially be a fiction or a yet, unlived reality. They have exhibited in various places such as Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, House of Electronic Kunst Basel, HKW, Berlin, Volksbühne, Berlin, and Stroom den Haag, Haag. They have been included in CTM Festival (2021), 34th Ljubljana Biennial (2021), 6th Athens Biennale (2018), Transmediale Festival (2019), and Impakt Festival (2018). In 2021 they co-curated the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah.

Lucia Pietroiusti is Head of Ecologies at Serpentine, London. As a curator, programmer and organisational strategist, she works at the intersection of art, ecology and systems, often outside of the exhibition space. Ecologies at Serpentine is a holistic initiative and purpose-led department aimed at embedding environmental responsibility throughout the organisation’s infrastructure, operations, networks and programming.

Pietroiusti was the founder of Serpentine’s General Ecology project, and the curator of Sun & Sea (Lithuanian Pavilion, 2019 Venice Biennale and ongoing tour). Together with Filipa Ramos, she is the curator of Songs for the Changing Seasons (Vienna Climate Biennale, 2024); Persones Persons (8th Biennale Gherdeïna, 2022) and The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (research, festival, podcast and publication series). Pietroiusti is also a curator of Sites of… Practice (E-WERK Luckenwalde, 2024), Back to Earth (Serpentine, 2020-22), and Infinite Ecologies Marathon (2023-24). Recent publications include More-than-Human (with Andrés Jaque and Marina Otero Verzier) and Microhabitable (with Fernando García-Dory).