by Artistic Research PhD Candidates of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Supervisor: Margarete Jahrmann
The research project “Emergent Worlds” explores the mechanics of world-building beyond the scope of speculative fiction. In Emergent Worlds, I aim to map the entanglement between fiction and reality and how networked technologies, live performance, game mechanics and virtual worlds affect their relationship. While the process of mapping this increasingly blurred border exposes multiple frames of reality that generate contemporary narratives and worldviews, it also creates contradictions within the research itself. The genealogy I use to underpin the research is constantly changing. Framing reality through language or technology produces cognitive artefacts and a fragmented body of works. This research is based on multiple ongoing projects and artworks, including installations, videogames and a collaborative performance practice with the artist group Hollow. In the collaborative performances and my individual works, I/we mix multiple media and embodied practices to submerge in the non-language-based aspects of interacting with fictional worlds that are both physical and virtual.
The projects on which my research is based are built on dissonance within their systems and histories. A significant influence within my methodology is “bleed”. Bleed is a phenomenon in roleplaying games when a fictional world enmeshes with the world around us during and beyond the roleplay. In this process, the references to consensual reality are weaved through the mechanics of world-building, and the player’s life is entangled with the character they play, resulting in an emergent otherworld.
My main questions are how speculative, para-fictional worlds interface with reality and how technologies and game mechanics shape systems of reality. As part of the Public Colloquium, I will present my latest project, which is part of Emergent Worlds, called Nesting, which was recently presented as a solo exhibition in Vienna at the Discotec Gallery. Nesting presented a reality-spanning story of a fictional community of urbex role-players who enact creatures and infrastructure they encounter when entering a forbidden place.
The project explores the interplay between fiction, myth-making, community and reality. Amidst fake news, global wars, pandemics, social media, fringe worldviews and political narratives, the modernist universal worldviews (from science to democracy) are proving to be insufficient and fragmented frames of reality. Nesting departs from this disillusionment in modernist world models and explores alternative communities that create their own shared worlds. The exhibition hosted multiple artefacts from the community’s semi-fictional world, their objects of rituals, scraps from past urbex trips and small monuments they built for the spirits they are possessed by.
In the 3-channel video, the virtual game world of Nesting was coupled with research video essays. The project is based on a two-year research project that explores the connections between science, real-estate developments, technology, and squatting. The story and the objects reference materials from the research range from urbex social media videos to anarcho-primitivist online subcultures and post-anthropocentric roleplaying games. In the centre of Nesting, a 3-channel video weaves found Youtube footage from urbex content creators, like NotMe and Shiey, with scientific videos of freshwater pearl mussels and architectural visualization of the Biodome in Budapest. Connecting a wide range of materials with the interview-like storytelling of Nesting, the exhibition weaves an intricate web of fiction and reality that creates associations between contemporary Hungarian politics, gameworlds and alternative communities.
As part of a fictional interview, the depicted roleplay community of Nesting appears in the form of virtual avatars who record their urbex trips as videogame worlds and simulations. They talk about their group, their experience of exploring abandoned and enclosed locations and their methods of enacting non-human creatures. Their rituals conjure methods of en-roling and de-roling, a technique of embodiment and transformation used in live-action roleplaying games. In the story’s current phase, they transform into freshwater pearl mussels, whom they encountered in a factory. Freshwater mussels live in rivers. They are an endangered species of mussels that can live up to 100 years, exceeding the lifespans of humans. They clean 50 litres of water daily in the rivers they live in. The rituals in the video enmesh the impossible embodiment of mussels and their anatomy through bodywork. The objects in the gallery space are physical replicas of the monuments and artefacts the fictional community created for their rituals of and commemorating the non-human labour mussels do.
The precursor project of Nesting is called “LAIR”, which was developed in 2022 as another virtual game world. In the current exhibition one of the videos processes this past work and couples it with research materials and appropriated footage from Hungarian government sources. LAIR revolved around the scandalous real-life history of Pannon Park, a Biodome development project in Budapest, Hungary. Pannon Park is part of a larger urban development project initiated by the currently ruling neoconservative party of Hungary, Fidesz. The goal of this project was to transform a major park called Városliget into a spectacle with buildings designed by world-famous architects and science centres. The particular construction of the Biodome would have hosted one of the largest artificial ecosystems in Europe, where multiple biomes coexist in a simulated and self-sustaining environment, providing access to historical reconstructions of the flora and fauna that existed hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Carpathian Basin. The real-estate project set an estimated budget in 2012 when the construction started, but as the years went by, the budget grew exponentially due to geopolitical shifts, hyperinflation and corruption. Currently, the construction of the Biodome is paused, and most assuredly, it won’t continue, leaving the skeleton of a 16.000 square meter building to decay in the centre of Budapest.
While unpacking the context and a speculative future of the Biodome and battery factories that sprawl in contemporary re-industrializing Hungary, Nesting focuses on how a community of role-players utilize private spaces through illegal urban exploration and squatting to build their own mythology and world. In this speculative future world, the project envisions alternative uses of abandoned places through storytelling.
Tamás Páll is an interdisciplinary artist from Budapest, working with digital media, installation, game design and performance. His works interweave Eastern European political narratives, techno-scientific worldviews and nonhuman storytelling. His projects are often based on long-term worldbuilding. The stories, installations and performances that channel his research are often fragmented and malleable as they materialize. He is a co-founder of the artist group Hollow. With Hollow he creates speculative live performances and cross-reality installations that revolve around the human body, club culture and alternative communities. In his Artistic Research PhD project he explores new forms of collective world-making, game mechanics and simulation.