Worldbuilding Problems
Al Warburton defines the role of the artist in the age of the GPU
There are many bifurcating art worlds in 2025, all of them in varying stages of disintegration or reinvention. Anachronistic 20th-century notions of artistic agency and autonomy have aged badly as we’ve been progressively bound into tighter cybernetic feedback loops. Today, many artists are reckoning not only with their uncomfortable complicity with big tech algorithms, platforms, engines and models, but also with their surprising demonization as cultural “gatekeepers” who oppose the rise of “democratic” AI media. Tough times.
Of course, critical practice still thrives to varying degrees in the work of artists and collectives like Forensic Architecture, Total Refusal, dmstfctn, Liam Young, Aureia Harvey, Theo Triantafyllidis, Lu Yang, and others. But for every worldbuilding artist-cum-LARPer-DJ investigating postcolonial technofuturism, there are a thousand other creatives, technicians, and engineers more closely aligned with big tech, all pushing the same tools in a different direction, setting both the pace and the direction of travel.
This, in a nutshell, is the premise of Worldbuilding Problems, the column I’m writing for Outland on the grinding tension between technocapital and creativity, spectacle and speculation, the engineer and the artist. I was an early investor in this scene, but I’m treating this column as a recuperative clerical project for a creative technologist-in-crisis. Part of that involves sketching close-up studies of applied worldbuilding, focusing on digital nature and digital bodies, virtual cameras, motion capture, and glitched sexuality. In the spirit of good worldbuilding, however, I’ll begin with the nuts and bolts.
Since the mid-2010s, “worldbuilding” has become an increasingly prismatic term, equally able to describe a literary project, interactive installation, brand strategy, meme subculture, or billion-dollar construction project. In contemporary art, it functions as a more expansive successor to “glitch,” helping point to the material specificity of a range of coalescent digital practices. While these practices are most easily associated with interactive game worlds (as evident in “Worldbuilding,” the exhibition Hans Ulrich Obrist curated for the Julia Stoscheck Foundation), the term has a multithreaded critical lineage.
We can refer most obviously to the literary, cinematic, and ludic traditions of worldbuilding, in which writers, game designers, directors, and sci-fi enthusiasts derive visceral pleasure from the internal consistency of imagined universes. Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories, Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, Ursula LeGuin’s essays, and the film theory of V.F Perkins are key texts here.
Yet we also have have queer, black, and cyberfeminist philosophy: the “worlding” of Donna Haraway, or the queer “world-making” of Jose Muñoz, Lauren Berlant, and Michael Warner add radical fizz to what would otherwise be a fairly mainstream concept. The basic premises of worldbuilding as a colonial project are problematized by writers like Katherine McKittrick, Ramon Amaro, and Octavia E. Butler.
Reading between these contrasting perspectives on worldbuilding gets us to the term’s deeper technopolitical provenance: the “scenario planning” practices developed by the US military-industrial sector to gain strategic advantage within uncertain postwar markets. This strain of corporate worldbuilding leads to seventy years of American hegemony, to speculative design and architecture, future studies, science fiction prototyping, and to the tech-existentialism of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Perhaps most significantly for the art world, it fed the thinking of filmmaker Harun Farocki and resulted in his influential films Serious Games (2009-2010) and Parallel I-IV (2014).
Parallel I-IV speculated on the weird phenomenology of digital worlds, but in recent years this speculation has become more obviously material. Convergent digital media has now reached metastable form in the game engine and the nascent AI world models of Meta, Google, OpenAI, and World Labs. We’re now firmly entrenched in a new kaleidoscopic regime: the age of the GPU; the Bauhaus panopticon; capitalist photorealism. Here, game designers, AI engineers, artists, VFX technicians, architects, and manufacturers circulate around the same software pipelines, most of which rely on hardware provided by NVIDIA, now the wealthiest company on the planet with a market cap of $4.2 trillion.
If we’re cynical, the age of the GPU is a project intended to reduce all life to cybernetic systems of control and command, presided over by tech oligarchs who believe that the world is a game of SimEarth, real people are NPCs, and power is a leaderboard. This is the satellite view: worldbuilding as world-burning. From here, artists are (at best) human collateral: a volunteer army of disruptive “storytellers” whose function is to pump out training data, to populate and gentrify virtual worlds, to accelerate investment, or to perform informal R&D on successive generations of unstable tech.
Viewed from ground level, however, you’ll find a swarm of critical technologists, inventive content creators, speculative design researchers and forensic media tacticians, all of whom exemplify Marshall McLuhan’s call—in Playboy’s March 1969 edition, no less—for artists to “plunge [themselves] into the vortex of electric technology and, by understanding it, dictate [their] new environment.” What thins out the worldbuilding herd is largely stamina: staying engaged and ambitious in a churning river rapids of bricked hardware, quicksilver algorithms, nihilist memes and truth-bending news stories comes with the constant risk of obsolescence. Playing chicken with the neoliberal call to “stay connected” is the game, and it’s not for the faint-hearted.
The real power of critical worldbuilding, however, is in its emerging opposition to those who claim that tech is “just a tool” and that worldbuilding is a guarantee of artistry. This is a view of art that prizes golden rules, golden ratios, and golden hours, triple-X anime LORAs and white photorealism. Its adherents cling to masculinist myths of auteurship, genius, and innovation that sour the tighter they’re held. It’s not just that dry 20th-century principles of artistry have been rehydrated for a tech-bro mirror world, but that those principles are so misaligned with real life, which feels visceral, chaotic, and dangerous.
This is the tension of worldbuilding as the world burns: GPUs and their trolls are eating the real through trillions of multithreaded apertures and a new worldbuilding project is happening around us. For better or worse, we have to find ourselves through our antagonists, to somehow—as NVIDIA, Oracle, or Vodaphone might say—stay connected.
Al Warburton is an applied media theorist working directly with CGI, AI, XR, VR, and ML between art, industry, and academia.