Worlds’ End Hackathon is a real game play (RGP), an experimental role-played work that takes place through the lens of a collectively fictioned process-based live narrative.

The narrative is centred around a group of strangers meeting without prior knowledge of each other and attempting to perform a succession of ritual worldings. Compiling votives in quick succession, pinned to the wall, others arranged on the floor the group mark-make, all the while including the necessity for communication whilst speculating to regulate the worlding developments accordingly—paper-prototyping by day and committing to embodied code by night over long-format hive-like services. The group attempts to form a series of hyper-worlding sigils that effectively provide multi-stable images of new interdependent flourishing ruins beyond this reality stack. Making palpable and demonstrable the need for the end of the world as we know it whilst simultaneously hacking an alternative ecology for the living.

The group is linked closely to the ideas of participatory universal lore, including but not limited to the notion that only the living can haunt the past.

Three active working groups are onsite during the hackathon: The Walkers, The Phoenix Keepers, and The Exo Protos. Each participant is allotted a team before their arrival; they will hack their world capsule for over 90 hours together while also choreographing and facilitating one worlding session, which all hackathon members will attend. The whole experience is facilitated by a group known as The Stewards; they will onboard each participant and generally care for and hold space for the event.

The days are spent surrounded by nature, operating as a collective unit, hijacking the virtual actual feedback of this world and constructing intersectional customs, rites, rules and forms of life. Over the days, the group builds momentum to find the exceptional state of new inter-death-world visioning, “a kind of offal, a waste product of the homogeneous system, a commodity produced but unaccounted for, an unplugged abyss in culture.” At the end of the week, each group will have committed their findings, hopes, speculations, and propositions to a Worlding capsule. We then ritually committed these capsules to the ground.
Exploring environmental, social, and mental ecologies, the group performs an intertextual release of worlding information pulsating forth from holes in the narrative votive structures. The work raises questions of social entanglement, translation, and identity from personal, communal, and ancestral frameworks. This also ties into recent developments in authentication and the emergence of fantastical versions of reality that ruminate in online forums and become real-life game-changers.

The practice generates theory and culture, which are then perceived as a structure. We analyse, explain, reform, test, and then perceive it again.

Commissioned for ARIA (Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly) 2024
Curated by: Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth
Produced by: Projekt Atol Institute, in collaboration with Šum, as part of More-than-Planet Project