This research addresses how performative, cooperative and simulated world building can be used as a mode of collective organising and a tool of cooperation to create alternative narratives of the dominant reality-system.
The research aims to link theory and practice by combining new materialism, gothic materialism, prefigurative tactics with live role-playing, game design, simulation and performative theory fiction in order to create new modes of cooperation and to imagine xenofuturities that fall outside of the scope of the futures industry [1]. With alternative modes of organisation enmeshed with symbiotic world building performers and players develop and transform narratives and game mechanics. In this fictional sandbox environment social and economic flows and rules that drives our present reality can be overwritten by the participants, thus experimental relationships can grow.
Creating new collective experiences based on performative simulation can constitute experimental comradeship [2] . Symbiotic world-building and game mechanics can be used as tools to reclaim collective imagineering of alternative futures, a cooperative practice that is disabled in late capitalism and westernized societies.
[1] Kodwo Eshun defines the “futures industry” as the intersecting industries of technoscience, fictional media, technological projection, and market prediction in his paper “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2003, pp. 287-302 (Article), Michigan State University Press, https://www.kit.ntnu.no/sites/www.kit.ntnu.no/files/KodwoEshun_Afrofuturism_0.pdf
He elaborates on the “futures industry” later in his talk at the conference “Narratives of a near future” and defines these processes that “all seek to extract, mine and trade on the future… they gear planetary processes towards their preferred future, they are predatory futures, hostile futurities and complicit futurisms” Kodwo Eshun at “Narratives of a Near Future”, New Campus HEAD, Geneve, CH on 14th December 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzlYCYS72fk
[2] Mark Fisher writes on “the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital” in his essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (2013), and suggests to learn and re-learn how to build comradery as a strategy to dismantle “the bourgeois modes of subjectivity” and to build “a new universality starts to build itself. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/