ARIA 2024: WORLDS’ END SYMPOSIUM PUBLIC PROGRAMME (LECTURES, DISCUSSIONS, SCREENING)

ARIA

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 followed it, 2024’s edition of ARIA navigated a twilight terrain of our very weird present where reality and fiction, familiar and alien, past and future mingled and cross-bled.

ARIA’s Worlds’ End Symposium focused on the interrelations of art, play, and ecological thinking at the nexus of politics, asking which imaginaries should have shaped artistic and institutional practice in a time of planetary upheaval.

Featuring lectures, discussions, a transformational game, and a screening and guided tour of the related exhibition, the symposium looked at speculative tools, approaches, and ideas that could have helped us put to rest the world-songs that had shaped our Anthropocene ecologies, tune into the rhythms of those emerging, create the conditions for radically new modes of being, and come to terms with the reality of extinction while glimpsing, beyond the horizon of the end, that which was to come.

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### SCHEDULE

**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 highlighted different methodologies and accounts of role-playing as artistic practice and tackled the political and pedagogical promise of the medium in a time marked by rising conservative politics and climate emergency. We discussed their approach to questions of agency, identity, and collectivity, as well as their shared interest in magick, mysticism, and the power of spill-overs between reality and fiction, the worlds of life and play. We asked how role-playing could have helped break down entrenched ideas, norms, and anthropocentric assumptions, laid the foundations for a collective worlding practice rooted in co-creative becoming rather than individualism, and prototyped 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 shed light on his recent work, which oriented planetary imaginaries towards the astronomical concept of the planet, and towards the speculative histories enabled by different solutions to the Fermi paradox. This had direct implications for politics and ethics of sustainability, as it guided 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 looked at animals and plants, we often witnessed 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 prompted 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 might not have known what lay ahead, but doubtlessly they knew how to prepare for it.

In this talk, Lucia Pietroiusti drew 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 tried to ask questions of a world that was ending. In a time of profound transformation, what habits of mind, what stories, what rituals, might have helped us hold, and weather, change? What embers did we already hold of what had been? How could we have made space for what we might never experience? And what did art have to do with any of this?

➤ **18.45–19.30**

**Q&A / Lucia Pietroiusti, Lukáš Likavčan**

Moderated by Tjaša Pogačar.

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**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 could all be defined as ‘mesocosms’: reduced and sealed ecosystems that were sites of speculation, sitting between controlled and emergent behaviours. By working through game studies and various historical formalisations of hypothetical alternative societies, this talk considered 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 wrote, “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 emerged when all modalities of existence were out of joint? And how could their pasts have been synthesised with their many potential futures? Was synthesis the right mode of organisation, or was a new, radically compositionist approach needed? In this talk, Klara Kofen examined her research on the 17th-century polycrisis that coincided with the birth of many modernities, alongside her work as a creator of operas, which served as formal, historical, organisational, and aesthetic vectors; a form of “multimodal worlding” that was translational, affective, and compositional.

➤ **17:00–17:30**

**Talk / Alice Bucknell: All the world’s polygons**

This talk explored 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 roamed the Earth’s surface with portable scanners, making good on their promise to “capture the whole world.” In Wyoming, a supercomputer ran simulations with a gaming company’s digital Earth twin to determine whether solar geoengineering was a good idea. In Taiwan, a gamer left their stream running as typhoon winds picked up IRL and in the world of GTA VI. Taking place inside a game engine, *All the world’s polygons* anticipated the darker drive of perfect simulation while considering the affective capacities of the game engine as an animate ecosystem, one that was 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 and Brandon Rosenbluth.

➤ **18.45–19.30**

**Film Screening / Cécile B. Evans: Reality Or Not**

*Reality or Not* (2023) followed a group of high school students from a suburb north of Paris who were invited by an American producer to participate in a reality TV show only to reject their own reality. Their story of radicalization was encouraged by the Producer (Evans) and narrated by their former teacher (Alexandra Stewart) as the students began a practice of world-jumping that moved the film across disparate realities. Alongside this group of young people, an eclectic array of characters constructed interwoven storylines ranging from a former *Real Housewives* star turned hacker who attempted to take down the International Monetary Fund to a group of failed renders of a virtual influencer that united to form a workers collective. The 35-minute film was lodged with penetrating humor to deliver cutting overviews of contemporary culture and seductive images that played a vital foil to the assault of ideas, luring audiences magnetically into the realities that unfolded. “No you, no me, no storylines”.

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### WORKSHOP

**Sunday, 18 August**

➤ **10.00–14.30**

**Worldbuilding session DIM – a game for sightless minds and curious limbs / Áron Birtalan**

As part of ARIA Worlds’ End Symposium, attendees were welcome to join ARIA resident and speaker Áron Birtalan on Sunday, 18 August, from 10.00–14.30 at Komuna Hall in Kino Šiška for a worldbuilding session.

*DIM* was an experimental game in which the group created a fictional ecosystem previously unheard of. This ecosystem was a dwelling for creatures, shapes, objects, and other curious bodies who moved and interacted with one another while never really knowing who or what it was they were encountering. Instead of crafting the world with the control and clarity of a master narrator, participants let their senses, their movement, and strange voices from a set of stones take the creative lead. In a way, *DIM* was a mixture between a role-playing game and a movement class, while also being a parody of both.