Earthbound: Speculating the World, Worldbuilding the Present

EARTHBOUND: Speculating the World, Worldbuilding the Present

Presented in collaboration with Spectra Studio, Earthbound was a symposium of talks, music, and artist performances taking place during LA Art Week 2026, positioning worldbuilding from speculative practice to material condition. The program asks what it means to build worlds when digital systems are no longer separate from physical reality, but embedded in hybrid infrastructures that merge computation, land, labor, and planetary processes. Any account of the present must now reckon with Earth as a finite, entangled system, ecological, geological, technological, and political.

Bringing together artists working with game engines, web-based platforms, AI, digital infrastructures, and networked systems, SYNTHESIS(2) foregrounds practices that treat technology not as a neutral tool, but as active infrastructure. Across lectures, conversations, and performances, artists examine how digital systems shape pedagogy, cultural narratives, ecological futures, and forms of power. Here worldbuilding is a present-tense practice: grounded, infrastructural, and oriented toward intervening in the conditions we already inhabit.

PROGRAM DETAILS

Alice Bucknell, “All The Worlds Polygons” Live lecture-performance staged inside the real-time 3D game engine Unreal Engine. The performance moves through evolving game levels and real-time environments exploring ecological simulation and how predictive climate technologies shape and potentially limit our imagination of planetary futures.

Isabel Beavers, “Game Stone Sky Gaze” A multi-media research performance examining ritual and computation through the material history of digital devices. Layering land-based research on copper mining with Greek mythology and ritual objects.

Qianqian Ye + Maisa Imamović: "What’s More Important Than Two Women Talking About Teaching Creative Coding in the Age of AI?" A dialogue performed in the style of a web-series blurring irreverence, internet culture and critical insight, this conversation explores how AI reshapes creative coding practices, classroom dynamics, and access to technological literacy; foregrounding feminist and community-centered approaches to teaching emergent tools.

Whisper, Shanhuan Manton: on digital sovereignty and collective infrastructure through Secret Server Club (SSC) community-held server systems as alternatives to corporate cloud platforms. Their work re-grounds digital technology in material reality and shared stewardship, treating infrastructure itself as a collective artistic and pedagogical practice.

Kira Xonorika + Vera Petukhova an open dialogue on worldbuilding and futurity, exploring how curatorial practice engages emergent technologies and in-process work. The conversation traces how speculative systems, evolving tools, and unfinished forms shape new cultural narratives and experimental infrastructures