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.
RELATED LINKS
https://miliaxinbi.xyz/
https://www.instagram.com/miliabbb/
Can Meeple Escape The Neurophoria exhibition at FACT
Carcassonne game
Jan Zuiderveld’s coffee machine as part of Can Meeple Escape The Neurophoria exhibition at FACT
Donald Winnicott’s concept of potential space originates from his book Playing and Reality
Joseph Wilk’s Crip Ship as part of Can Meeple Escape The Neurophoria exhibition at FACT
Gilles Deleuze introduced the term dividual in his 1990 essay Postscript on the Societies of Control
Karen Hao’s talk at Manchester Business School
Sam Lavigne’s SlowLLM browser
McKenzie Wark Gamer Theory
K Allado-McDowell’s concept of Neural Media
Katherine N. Hayles’ idea of an integrated cognitive framework originates in her book Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts
Cat-fu video examples: here, and here
QQ by Tencent
Y7 Undead Internet Theory talk and screening at ESEA
Ivan Seal’s exhibition Your Guests Never Mention Me at Alma Pearl as part of The Black Lights Festival in Blackpool
TeleAI (The Institute of Artificial Intelligence of China Telecom)