Worlding as Research
In this hybrid performance lecture and interactive workshop, designer, engineer, and artist Flora Weil will lead participants in staging worlding experiments grounded in a broader conceptual history of worldbuilding.
The end of the world, or at least of a world, has happened before. If a world is the projection of meaning onto a space of shared experiences, then worlds collapse whenever these patterns become illegible. Reversely, a world can emerge from common codes which transform, gain autonomy, and sometimes escape authorial control.
How has the agency to create and dissolve worlds been shaped by a common evolving reality marked by technologies like LLMs that redefine our relationship to language, imagination, and meaning? How can the practice of making worlds become a form of strategic research, which can in turn shape the design of technologies themselves?
In this hybrid performance lecture and interactive workshop, designer, engineer, and artist Flora Weil will ground contemporary practices of worldbuilding in a broader conceptual history, serving as a point of departure for hands-on prototyping with worldbuilding tools (including Blender Copilot, Cesium, Unity, and Meshy) aimed at expanding and diversifying existing conceptual, aesthetic, and technical methods for worlding.
These experimental methods will delve into four strategies:
- Unworlding will explore the dismantling and decentering of existing worlds
- Co-worlding will leverage emergent artificial imaginations to forge new ones
- Deep-worlding will probe how we can become better archivists and custodians of deep-time knowledge
- Hyperworlding will enable the manipulation of these archives, augmenting scales and perspectives to reveal new worlds hidden within their seams.
Worlding as Research will involve designing, building, and testing these tools to explore new ways of thinking, representing, and experiencing worlds throughout their lifecycle from their excavation to their burial, from their dispersal to their re-emergence.
No previous experience is necessary and all materials are provided for you in this workshop.
Course Logistics
Dates: Sunday January 21, 2024
Times: 11AM-2PM PT
Location: Gray Area / Grand Theater
2665 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110
Cost: FREE
Experience Level: Any
Requirements:
• Experience with 3D modeling tools such as Unity and Blender is a plus, but the activities in this workshop are designed with optionality according to experience level.
Additional Information:
• No refunds or exchanges
• View our FAQ here
• Contact [email protected] with any questions
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