Speakers: Áron Birtalan, Alice Bucknell, Carina Erdmann, Cécile B. Evans, Tom K Kemp, Klara Kofen, Lucia Pietroiusti, Lukáš Likavčan, Omsk Social Club
With a two-day symposium open to the public and the closed-door role-playing game that follows it, this year’s edition of ARIA navigates a twilight terrain of our very weird present where reality and fiction, familiar and alien, past and future mingle and cross-bleed.
ARIA’s Worlds’ End Symposium will focus on the interrelations of art, play and ecological thinking at the nexus of politics, asking which imaginaries should shape artistic and institutional practice in a time of a planetary upheaval.
Featuring lectures, discussions, a transformational game, and a screening and guided tour of the related exhibition, the symposium will look at speculative tools, approaches, and iIdeas that can help us put to rest the world-songs that have shaped our Anthropocene ecologies, tune in to the rhythms of those emerging, create the conditions for radically new modes of being, and come to terms with the reality of extinction while ‘learning how to see beyond the approaching horizon of the end, towards that which shall come’ (F. Campagna).
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 magic, 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
Discussion with Lucia Pietroiusti and Lukáš Likavčan, moderated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth
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 & Brandon Rosenbluth
➤ 18.45–19.30
Movie 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”.
More information: https://projekt-atol.si/en/work/worlds-end-symposium-public-programme/
ARIA (Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly) is a summer school designed as a role-playing game that takes place through the lens of a fiction-theory narrative. It hosts an international cohort of mentors – artists, critical thinkers, and other experts to explore ways of imagining new possibilities for what our world can be in the time of changing planetary ecology.
ARIA, Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly
17– 23 August 2024
Curated by: Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth
Production: Projekt Atol Institute (Lara Mejač and Uroš Veber)
In collaboration with: Šum journal (Društvo Galerija Boks)
Co-Production: Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, International Centre of Graphic Arts Ljubljana (MGLC)
Real game play design and facilitation: Omsk Social Club
Visual design: Nicola Tirabasso
ARIA is organized as part of the More-Than-Planet project, co-funded by the European Union as part of the Creative Europe framework and supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Public Administration and the City of Ljubljana.
