Description
What is a world and how is it made? Surveying the historical techniques of worldbuilding spanning science fiction narratives to more recent permutations across architecture, contemporary art, and gaming culture, Ways of Worlding introduces students to multiple aesthetic and narrative strategies for making worlds. Led by artist and writer Alice Bucknell, the course toggles across scales: moving from a macro-level approach to systems building, to considering the design and agency of landscape and environment, before ultimately honing in on the characters (protagonists, antagonists, ghosts, monsters, human, more-than-human) inhabiting these worlds. Seminar reading and discussion groups will be supplemented with film screenings, gameplay sessions, lectures, workshops, and projects offering students a hands-on approach to worlding with emergent technologies. Traversing the entangled disciplines of architecture, ecology, philosophy, magic, speculative design, queer theory, and collaborations