CSNI researcher Teodora Sinziana Alata is presenting a paper titled “Affective Attunement within Virtual Ecologies: Immersive Worlding as Posthuman Storytelling Practice”, on 25th April, as part of the Politics of the Machines 2024 conference in Aachen, Germany, which reflects on game engines as software infrastructures, worlding with reality media, speculative storytelling, and alternative epistemologies. More info at: https://www.pomconference.org/pom-aachen-2024/
The paper sets out to explore emergent practices of ‘worlding’ with volumetric and reality media as posthuman storytelling projects that constitute modes of resistance to contemporary technological paradigms. Drawing on feminist technoscience and decolonial thought, this research calls into question the ideological relationship between narrative archetypes, volumetric assets and environmental design within the software infrastructures of game engine technologies. By approaching the practice of algorithmic worlding through the lens of software studies, an analysis of game engines as complex, yet largely blackboxed computational frameworks is proposed, where networked exchanges, software operations and narrative complexity often tend to be obscured in favour of representational allure.
Aiming to broaden the critical understanding of immersive worlding, this research examines a series of attempts to cultivate more-than-human epistemologies and reflects on their situatedness within the existing cultural politics of such software infrastructures – attentive to the tensions between programmed archetypes and rhizomatic, non-linear and anticolonial posthuman storytelling projects, a tentative refiguration of the relationship between code, volumetric assets and affective potential within immersive spaces is explored, focused on the ways in which extended realities enable speculative dreaming beyond the ideologies of platforms.