Notes on Worldbuilding
*Davide Tolfo is the bookseller and literary host of the legendary bookstore called bruno in Venice, a really friendly and intelligent reader-of-everything, who is themselves a writer and translator. This text came up in conversation when we visited bruno as we were talking about some upcoming projects which revolve around this thing we are loosely calling Worldbuilding (cosmotechnics)
From contemporary art to architecture, design, and electronic music, the concept of worldbuilding has become increasingly pervasive. The idea that a literary work, a videogame, or a musical project might present itself as a world to be explored - rather than as a mere product to be consumed - has become a defining feature of many recent productions. Drawn into the task of reconstructing the history of the universe in which they find themselves, actively implicated in the unfolding of its narrative, or invited to reconfigure their own everyday reality through the instruments furnished by these constructed worlds, the participant becomes by turns an explorer, an actor, or a messenger.
Yet simply rendering an environment more dynamic does not suffice to constitute a world. What, then, does it mean to give form to a world? Why do theorists, writers, as well as architects and designers, increasingly feel compelled to mobilize the term worldbuilding to describe their practices? Is it possible to identify points of contact that orient us within what appears, at first glance, to be an uncontrolled proliferation of works produced under this umbrella-concept? To address such questions entails traversing examples and theories from multiple domains and disciplines, in search of the shared infrastructures underlying contemporary worldbuilding processes.
In order not to lose oneself amidst the infinite proliferation of models, this text is divided into four portals or thematic zones. Each portal is characterized by a spectrum of temperatures that define its internal climate. The exploration of its areas will unfold through chapters that highlight their common theoretical foundations. At the same time, it is precisely the contrasts with neighboring fields that will help define the distinctive features of the territory under examination. The zones of the book may be crossed freely by the reader, without any predetermined order of access. Moving from one chapter to another, it becomes possible to sketch a cosmology in which divergent worlds reveal themselves through their discontinuities and points of passage.
–40 °C : 7 °C, the Inhuman Arctic
From Lovecraftian imaginaries to black metal theory, from geotrauma to creepypasta, cultural productions invoking worlds populated by inhuman entities are proliferating. Regardless of explicit theme, it is the environment itself that becomes hostile, generating the sense of a diffuse and non-localized threat. This atmosphere of dread foregrounds the architecture of such places. They are inhospitable zones, hunting grounds where exploration and the deciphering of signals - clues to how one might navigate space - become the primary instruments of survival.
18 °C : 29 °C, the Valley of Alterities
Bots simulating human beings, digital aesthetics that present themselves as sensorial universes, sonic environments crystallizing through musical loops, mythologies born from obscure chats: in the post-Internet era, online cultures and memetic phenomena have engendered collective worldbuilding that seems to exceed the intentions of their human creators. To approach these worlds without an anthropocentric vision of the network is to acknowledge the proliferation of unstable narrative universes, in which the human is but one actor among many in a digital ecosystem composed of spam, AI-generated images, and bots animated by conspiracy theories.
32 °C : 45 °C, the Tropics of the Post-Anthropocene
The diffusion, across art, literature, and music, of theories associated with speculative realism and the new materialisms has, over the past decade, generated a proliferation of works attempting to delineate post-Anthropocene worlds. Haraway’s invitation to survive in an infected world has been taken up in the creation of full-fledged cultural ecosystems, in which the ontological geographies that once separated humans from inhuman agents are reconfigured. These are often attempts to construct worlds where human centrality is displaced in favor of a multispecies perspective. Worldbuilding here becomes a mode of critically rethinking the theoretical imprint of the Anthropocene, or, in other words, a way of projecting imagination beyond the imminent trauma of ecological collapse.
9 °C : 16 °C, the Undergrowth of Networks
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin emphasized the narrative function that objects such as bags, shells, pots, and bowls can play in world-construction. Le Guin’s proposal has been mobilized not only for the creation of literary and ludic universes in which the hero and their quest no longer occupy the narrative center, but also to conceive worlds structured around network models. Each network model, however, bears its own peculiarities, in turn giving rise to divergent worlds. By examining the models of the spiderweb, the mycelium, the rhizome, and the swamp, this portal demonstrates how worldbuilding can assume decentered, polyphonic, and mutualistic forms.