World Building: Artist Statement

Prompted by a simple question, "what if when we died we just respawned rather than actually dying?" the first thing that Bronte, Max and I had to do was to establish the rules of the world we were creating. Deciding how it would work logistically had to happen before we could know how it would affect the world.

The more questions we tried to answer the more came up: Under what circumstances could someone actually die and pass on? Would it be painful? When someone respawns, do they retain injuries or illnesses? Where do they come back? Is it all technology-based or is it a naturally-occurring phenomenon? It was an interesting challenge because each different answer would affect this society in different ways.

We tried to produce "artifacts" that would give a pretty good spread of perspectives on how this world might be affected. One of the most obvious things we began with was that in a society like this, obviously "dying" would not hold the same weight as it does in ours. People could easily become desensitized to the idea of death and even create more and more extreme forms of entertainment in order to compete with that. Early on, Max suggested the idea of a kind of extreme olympics in which death was almost an inevitability in the course of extreme competitions.

We tried to create something of a political or ethical division within our world. The question came up, what if killing yourself was just used as a means of teleportation because of the ease of getting from one place to another? Most would be dissuaded from this because of the pain and discomfort associated with death, but if someone created a painless way to die, would people use it? Bronte created an article around that concept, including arguments from both sides about the potential ethical implications.

One of the last questions after considering entertainment, ethics and other topics was, how would we educate our children? How would they adapt in a world like this? So we designed a few pages of an informative booklet for kids, the kind you would find in a pediatrics ward, giving some advice to kids from an adult's perspective.

This was definitely an interesting project. We drew inspiration from sources in our own world, like political debates, advertisements, and the gladiator fights of ancient Rome, and adapting it to a new world with new rules was interesting and challenging. Considering the ramifications a single change could have on society was eye-opening. It was really apparent the kind of cyclical nature between a society and the kind of art and other aspects of culture that it produces. Everything man has created in our world is a response to our needs and values as a society, and vice-versa. Julian Becker's article talk about how stories and fantasies like these can tell us a lot not just about how changes would affect other worlds, but that they go a long way in helping us understand our own world as well.