KOOZ The programme at Somerset House Studios takes the name of "New Worlds", could you expand a bit more on the title?

AB The title of the series refers to the practice of world-building, or worlding - the collaborative construction of new and alternative worlds. Most frequently associated with science-fiction and its offshoots, world-building involves the building of fictional narrative environments in which to tell a story. But more recently, through the work of thinkers like Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, as well as feminist sci-fi authors like Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, this practice of world-building has become an urgent and shared strategy for making sense of a weirded climate and morphing global ecology. I like “worlding” as a verb as it suggests a practice that is always ongoing; similarly, the plural ‘worlds’ acknowledges that there is no singular, one-word world - these worlds exist in multitudes, and are always changing. The series wants to prevent multiple and interconnected artists’ worlds in a way that’s non-prescriptive and experimental.

KOOZ The five events engage nine diverse contributors from varying backgrounds and disciplines, to what extent is the making of worlds a collaborative and transdisciplinary practice?

AB There is considerable thematic overlap within the series, which is loosely organized into five ideas across as many events: sound as a world-making tool, machine magic and techno-poetics, ecological futures and nonhuman storytelling, ritual as technology, critical fictioning and non-linear time. These themes are porous and entangled; as such, the five events can be considered parts of the same whole, or complements to each other, while making space for each of the artists’ work and worlds. Four of the five events feature two artists whose practices have shared research interests or strategies but diverge in other ways - for me it’s as much about a sense of productive friction than any kind of synchrony. The idea of quantum thinking could also be applied here - the potential to hold multiple ideas in one’s mind simultaneously - the worlds become animated through the multiple ways of looking at them, the multiple forms of attention. The same could be said of collaborative and transdisciplinary practice - all of the artists involved in the New Worlds series hold collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches close to their work. Personally I think the most exciting worlding projects stem from collaboration - the multiple voices involved, the different perspectives - they add a richness and a sense of emergence that’s always growing new offshoots. It’s the in-between that keeps the world airborne.

KOOZ As a highly experiential programme, the formats span from conversations to performances, installations and film screenings, how do the diverse and multisensorial formats seek to immerse the audience within the themes discussed and these new worlds?

AB All of the artists involved produce multisensorial, immersive projects as part of their practice, so the series wants to lean into that, using the raw and cavernous architecture of Somerset House Studios’s River Rooms while also pushing back against the kind of political and social worlds it historically represents. Although the format varies from one event to the next, we typically split the presentations across multiple spaces of the River Rooms - this gives each project its own environment - whether it’s for a reading, listening exercise, or live game walkthrough - while also creating a sense of flow and movement throughout the evening. The presentations themselves are meant to be durational and immersive - I encourage people to chill out, lay back on the floor or a pillow, and take it all in. We saturate the spaces with different color uprights for each event so there’s a kind of ambience; for the first event, one of the artists Evan Ifekoya created their own scent component from blended essential oils which added another layer to the space. So far the events have naturally concluded with an opening up to the audience: a casual conversation I have with one or both of the artists, un-mic’d and spontaneous, morphs and stretches into an open Q+A where people can ask questions or share reflections from the evening. It’s meant to be a generative space, one that feels quite porous, speculative, and open, that invites engagement from the audience. The final two events with Bones Tan Jones and Omsk Social Club with Joey Holder will be even more participatory and immersive.

KOOZ In what ways do these worlds respond and challenge the conditions of the contemporary world we currently inhabit?

AB Taken together, these projects and the worlds they produce are an exercise in speculative storytelling - in Haraway’s words, it matters what stories we tell, it matters who tells them, it matters what words world worlds. These worlds are visions of potential futures that are less extractivist, less anthropocentric, less apocalyptic, and less destructive. They are worlds wherein ancient cosmologies and emergent technologies intersect and riff off each other in symbiotic ways. They are worlds which listen to the intelligence of nonhuman life to envision more ecological ways of co-existing on this planet. They are worlds where we question the logic of linear-progressive time, of unchecked capitalism, and posit alternatives. They are worlds that go in pursuit of magic and all its generative offshoots. I’d like to think the narrative environments of this event series also promote a practice of attention - to build shared worlds that do not place humans at their center.

KOOZ Through your practice, and mediums as game engines you frequently explore and test the thresholds between architecture, ecology, magic, and machine intelligence, how important is it for you to continuously investigate alternative imaginaries?

AB It’s crucial for me to position my work in this environment. Like the writer Ursula K. Le Guin suggested, science-fiction (and its offshoots of speculative fiction, feminist sci-fi, ecological sci-fi, the new weird, and so on…) is a descriptive, not prescriptive practice. Though valorized by Silicon Valley tech bros as future market oracles, I think most writers and artists working with speculative fiction would agree that the practice is less of an effort in future-casting or fantasizing about some far-off utopia (or dystopia), than a dilation or mirror image of the present that’s been enlarged for clarity.

Although the speculative worlds I create may seem extreme - a hi-tech eco-tourist retreat in Florida Swampland, a cryptocurrency-based survival architecture for the 1%, or a multinational conglomerate extracting clean air and water from Mars and selling them back to Earth to the highest bidder - these narratives are simply dialed-up versions of existing entities or proposals that are already under development. Occasionally, a project makes it into the feed of a real estate developer or investor and I get enquiries, as if the work is a genuine business opportunity. It’s interesting and alarming how an idea that is quite obviously a critique of power imbalances, techno-solutionism, and extreme capitalism in art and architecture contexts, can translate to appealing business ideas in speculative finance circuits. I think that points to an urgency of having this conversation, of acknowledging the speculative is always a sliding scale, and the importance of creating worlds that throw into relief the ways that technology, machine intelligence, and architecture are being used to sow further inequity while also proposing alternatives.

KOOZ How do you imagine these observations laying the groundwork for a future navigation and inhabitation of the metaverse?

AB There’s an article on this subject I like to reference - ‘Enter the Mutaverse’ by Fiona Glen, published on ArtReview. The article points to a few recent projects by contemporary artists - Joey Holder and Sahej Rahal among them - that reflect on the value of contamination and mutation - or the messiness that can flourish beneath or inspire of a seamless, homogenising, market-ready “metaverse”. Glen terms this alternative a “mutaverse” - and rightly suggests that digital artists have been working towards an unofficiated idea of the metaverse - speculative communities that merge physical and digital environments - long before Big Tech came in swinging, attempting to brand and sow market interest in the concept. Understanding the importance of glitches, mutants, and morphing alliances with uncertain ends to me speaks to a way that we can reconcile this technology and future worlds with a non-hierarchial, less human-centric and ultimately less capitalistic idea of what the muta/metaverse is and what it can do.

KOOZ Where do you see your research taking you in the coming years?

AB I’m hoping to continue my collaborative, research-based practice - for my most recent project, The Martian Word for World is Mother, this involved collaborations with anthropologists, astronomers, space lawyers, NLP (Natural Language Processing) specialists, linguists, and drone data mappers. I always feel like I learn so much from the process of working together - seeing the same idea from multiple different perspectives is kind of hallucinogenic and always sprouts new ideas and connections. If possible, I’d love to experiment with actually making a video game - I work in game engines as is, and recently made a mini-game for the Het Niewue Instituut in Rotterdam, which I enjoyed a lot, so it does seem like a natural next step that could be more participatory or generative than previous projects. There’s an element of interactivity and more intimate storytelling to playing and designing a game, which I’d love to explore. I’m also hoping to continue working with emerging Language AIs - like GPT-3, which I’ve collaborated with for New Mystics, as well as others - to continue blurring the voice of human and nonhuman authors. I’d also like to continue folding this research and practice into teaching - currently, I lecture at CSM’s Narrative Environments MA, and will be teaching a short course on Worlding at the Berlage next spring. Finally, in addition to making work, I would also love to hang out more in the research end of things, potentially collaborating or getting involved with the actual development of new technologies that use AI and machine-learning. Getting artists involved in the earlier research and development side of tech, to temperature-check the technologies and ask after their social and political potentials and ramifications, sadly isn’t as much of a thing these days - even by the time it hits beta phase, the technology already has certain ideologies that run on binaries and efficiency models baked into it. But this does appear to be shifting again, with the evolution of research programs like Google's Artists + Machine Intelligence initiative. So I'd hope to slot into this world and open it up a little, allowing my practice to bleed into the tech and vice versa.

Bio

Alice Bucknell is a North American artist and writer based in London. Working primarily through video game engines, her current work explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and non-human and machine intelligence. In 2021, she established New Mystics, a collaborative platform exploring the practices of 12 artists merging magic, mysticism, and ritual with advanced technology. She has exhibited her video work internationally, most recently including the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Fiber Festival, Kunsthalle Wien, Ars Electronica with KÖNIG GALERIE, White Cube, and Serpentine Galleries.
Her writing appears regularly in art, architecture and design publications including Flash Art, Frieze, Harvard Design Magazine, Mousse, PIN-UP and The Architectural Review. She is currently an Associate Lecturer in MA Narrative Environments, part of the Spatial Practices program at CSM, and has lectured at various international universities and institutions. She studied Anthropology and Visual Art at the University of Chicago and Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art in London.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.