S6 [Becoming Image] E3: Ready Player None [w/Milia Xin Bi]

What does it mean to imagine alternatives to prescripted narratives when AI has already prescribed the rules of the world? How to navigate prescriptive AI systems to prototype other worlds, other rules, and other ways of playing within algorithmic constraint?

In this episode, curator and writer Milia Xin Bi discusses how board games and tabletop RPGs shape her practice exploring media art, emerging technologies, and games, contrasting their improvisational “in-between” play with the predesigned possibilities of video games. 

We talk about her recent exhibition at FACT “Can Meeple Escape Neophoria?”, as well as AI and hybrid agency, glitches and gaps as sites of play, the gallery as a space to preserve friction against technology’s drive to collapse distance, and what modding and speedrunning can tell us about alternative tech futures. Cat-fu gets an honourable mention too.