GLOSSARY
Storyworld premise - A storyworld is different from our own world, it can have a different history or geography or have different physical laws. This sets the parameters for what characters and narratives can be derived from it. It makes up the premise that world. The premise of my storyworld NRE is "that the present is controlled by a future generation through time technology. It monitor and regulate how all inhabitants use resources & life-space in the present"
or
"that future generations has hacked the present so that the earth system updated herself into a cyborg gaia. Cyborg gaia monitors and regulate how all inhabitants use resources & life-space."
Worlding – a form of action, a careful response, a halted impulse. A term from material feminist thought about making "cuts" in the world, enacting interventions that produce the world I inhabit. Worlding is acknowledging the relations, how I am entangled in the world, while acting. The concept of worldings resonate with my artistic practice a lot, my main interests are in systems and “wholes”, the full range of things, from material to structural to epistemological and ontological. I prefer to make interactions on all levels simultaneously in order to trace their effects, how they are connected, how they interact and affect each other. I see life and the world as a collective process, an ongoing narration. I tap into these ongoing narratives, make small contributions, deviate things a bit in order to shift the meanings or outcomes. I use inner imaginary worlds to push my perspective on what actions are possible. Sometimes I refer to it as fanfiction.
Worldbuildning - A term for the art form of imagining and creating alternative worlds. New Reactive Earth (NRE) is a fictional world sparked by my collaboration and experiment with Ron Mallet around his time machine theory in 2011. NRE is characterized by a radical climate justice, due to an intrusion from the future, at the culmination of the Warm War II. Worldbuilding is for me the basic mode of perceiving the world, processing it and finding ways to act in it, since as a child constructing fiction parallels to my everyday life. I'm drawn to worldbuilding as an artform also through my interest in systems and the “the whole”. This in its turn brings about the desire for sustainability. For things to be fair, balanced, for “the whole” to sustain and thrive.
Backcasting - a planning method that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified future to the present. The fundamental question of backcasting asks: "if we want to attain a certain goal, what actions must be taken to get there?"I arrived to the method intuitively by thinking through Mallets Time travel theory, and later learned about the term backcasting. (The the method was first outlined by John B. Robinson.)
Research infrastructure - the structures that research is channeled through, that shapes the knowledge that comes out of it. I have worked with trying to dismantle fossil infrustructure in my research, in order to see how that changes the knowledge.
Safe scarcity - The methods and experiments with scarcity, limitations and degrowth in creative practices of this project has been done in a safe environment, with salary and basic needs met. Not to be compared with involontary scarcity such as poverty.
Tempus nullius - the treatment of the future as predefined, depriving it of its inherent right to take form on its own terms. For example by dominant narratives or by depleating all resources. A modification of the term Terra Nullius in order to bridge the thinking of the colonial into the temporal dimension.
Dominant narratives - narratives that reduce the possiblities of other co-existing narratives. Dominant narratives of the future closes the possibility for other paths forward. Dominant narratives aims to immerse us, aims to cast us to act out and fulfil its scripts.
Dominant storyworld - a term I use for narratives that tries to narrow our view on our world and reality. It borrows from; grand narratives, meta narratives, filter bubbles etc. It's mechanisms sometimes has a purpose based in lobbying, sometimes it is a result of technological automation. The term came to me after the last election. I wrote in my journal in sept 14 2022: How can we create inner story world that can sustain us? In a society where our imagination is infiltrated and hijacked for destructive purposes. How kan we resist, how can we critically work with our own imagination, as a conscious striving to enable sanctuary for intuitive, creative flow, countering coercion from faschist trolls and marketing algorithms, countering world building of dominant story worlds that wants to engulf us, such as the right wing story world of this election campaign.
Sustaining enchantment - Thanks to the embodied state the limited use of resources and energy put me in, I can sustain an immersion in the storyworld that is my platform for resistance. This immersion enables me to respond, "world" according to more gorounded considerations of the here and now & my actual experiences.
The university is gradually incorporated and fully connected to the cyborg Gaia. Assessment of its overall current climate footprint benchmark is underway.
A 30% decrease of its climate footprint will be implemented piece by piece . This group of students (Sharing Practices) is aligning organically and mutually . Branches that do not align/connect will be given an ultimatum and a path to follow in connecting and adapting to the cyborg Gaia. An ultimatum that can halt established impulses, deepen the story, and force characters to change and make hard choices. Help them overcome what stands in their way and maybe even offer emancipation .
The potential of every time, place and act reset to its original full range of possibilities, the way that only fantastical genres can facilitate, setting off new diverging trajectories. Arriving at this point, where we explore the expanded potentials in this very time, place and act:
Transcript of embodied storying:
A few years ago things changed dramatically, setting off a series of events leading up to this moment. A time machine experiment shifted the basic conditions for life. The experiment caused a tunnel in the temporal dimension. It was a one-way tunnel from another side. A one-way tunnel from a future point in time. A point in time where a subaltern future resided. A future undermined, deprived by the present, of its right to form in diverse ways. The tunnel opened a way for this future to arrive as an emancipated force in the present.
With this intrusion, the future aimed to take back its diverse ways of forming. With this intervention, it aimed to disarm the present of its centralized, disproportionate powers. It did so by using the increased connectivity of systems to monitor and limit the use of recourses by the present, since it was that overuse that had led to the extinction of species and narrative trajectories, reducing the future’s options to take form into one single version. It did so by infiltrating all processes on earth, mechanically, biologically, emotionally. trickling its way into an omnipresent cyborg gaia. Forcing established impulses to stop and question themselves.
At the university, most processes are not yet connected. Some overdraws of resources has been detected and limited. But most impulses are still according to outdated protocols.
Though some roots and branches of the university are getting aligned with the 30% decrease of the Paris agreement. And this aligning is gradually spreading further through the networks.
Giving birth to new trajectories of shift and change, reviving fallen beginnings and interrupted commitments, reopening dead ends and making the contracted timelines diverge again. Reversing the current path of extinction, opposing temporal settlers.
So can this dramaturgical ultimatum itself help to divert this narrative from the set manifestations of the future, help the story to stay with an open-ended-ness? Can conditioning the assumed endpoint, pave way for a more diverse array of narrative trajectories?
Staying with open-ended-ness
Jag vet inte vad som kommer hända
I dont know what is going to happen
—•—
A research seminar in the form of an ultimatum.
Plot summary:
The setup of the first act begins with a hook. An invitation to present the project at a staff meeting is turned into a call to join. The audience joins the created world through a shutdown and becomes a new "us" with a common voice, a voice of LCA.
The inciting moment is shared in a flashback to 2011 by recalling a time machine experiment changing the conditions of life, forcing this tale on its journey.
In the second act, the promise of the premise is given through the machine called Elsa, enabling everyone to interact with and embody the premise in all facets of their different doings.
But still, it turns out inadequate to fulfill the quest. It seems hopeless to reach the actual turning. The mission seems impossible without a conflict. In a last attempt an ultimatum is issued, that puts it all at stake……….
Will it lead to resolution in a third act or not?
