About Starholder

Latest revision as of 20:54, 7 December 2023

Starholder is a worldbuilding project in search of its founding text. It is an exploration of networked media and the new forms it enables. We start with the word. It acts as the founding source code from which everything else is rendered upon.

Background

The conceit behind Starholder is that in 1999, rampant techno-anxiety triggered by the Y2K bug results in a new timeline emerging. The Starholder Timeline barely diverges from our reality at first, but as time goes on, things get weirder, and the drift accelerates until this new world is almost unrecognizable as originating from our own.

There are laws, physics and lore behind the origin and operation of the Timeline. You can find that on the Timeline Properties page. What one needs to know is that the timeline acts as a buffer system in which the unbearable and destabilizing excesses of late capitalism and techno-accelerationsim are shunted off into Starholder to keep our reality from crashing. This new world is disposable, and its purpose is to take in all the trash that would destroy ours.

These butterfly effects compound, pushing divergence further as each new one is overlaid on the last. As a consequence, the Starholder Timeline lives the future faster, harder and is forced to confront events that reorient humankind on a far too frequent basis. Chaos abounds, but naïve techno optimism drives its inhabitants because bleak dystopias are played out and boring.

Structure

The Timeline covers one hundred years of imagined history, from 1999 to 2099 broken into periods. Each is an exploration of a technological package and its effect on society & culture.

The End Of History (1999 - 2016)
Networked Life Intensifies (2017 - 2033)
The Great Disruption (2034 - 2049)
Headlong Into The Hyperreal (2050 - 2069)
The Second Moon Event (2070-2079)
The Impending Collapse (2080 – 2099)

The goal of the project is to tell the stories of each period and weave them together into a larger overarching narrative capable of delivering meaning while also hitting people in the feels. Starholder takes a bottom-up approach to worldbuilding, using stories, characters, places, and things as scaffolding with an expectation that over time a grand narrative emerges on top of it.

It starts with text as the foundation, but it is text that is meant to be rendered up continually over time into new forms of networked media. Think of the words as the substrate on which the world is built and then rebuilt, authored by humans and AI. Starholder is as much a fictional timeline as it is a training model for future creation.

Objectives

The objective of the timeline is twofold:

Render up a 100 year fictional history that becomes an important myth within our culture.
Create a historical arc that does not end in failure and collapse upon itself in its year 2099.

These objectives operate on two levels:

Can Starholder capture the necessary attention of others to see the timeline built out and its story told to completion in a way that achieves cultural importance?
Deliver a satisfying ending where the Starholder Timeline overcomes the odds of failing and finds a viable alternative to the dystopias assumed by late-stage capitalism. Can we fulfill our debt to our audience by saving Starholder from its planned destruction?

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-Starholder is an art project exploring networked media and generative storytelling.
+Starholder is a worldbuilding project in search of its founding text. It is an exploration of networked media and the new forms it enables. We start with the word. It acts as the founding source code from which everything else is rendered upon.
-Structurally, it is an alternative timeline covering 1999-2099 which imagines that our world is being actively managed by a Cosmic Corp of Engineers (CCE) who are trying to keep late capitalism from failing before a viable replacement economic system can be developed. The CCE does this by creating the Starholder Timeline, which acts as a buffer system where all sorts of potential harmful butterfly events are removed from our world and dumped into the alternative timeline. This process creates a world that is weirder, more anxious, and accelerated in its technological development than the one we live in.
+== Background ==
-In short, Starholder is a speculative sandbox that basks in the extreme weirdness of technology-induced anxiety, late-stage capitalism and the human race's transition into a networked species.
+The conceit behind Starholder is that in 1999, rampant techno-anxiety triggered by the Y2K bug results in a new timeline emerging. The [[Timeline Chronology|Starholder Timeline]] barely diverges from our reality at first, but as time goes on, things get weirder, and the drift accelerates until this new world is almost unrecognizable as originating from our own.
-Starholder operates within our realm of physics. There is no magic inside the Starholder Timeline. Some events may appear magical, but that is the result of accelerated technical development and a warping of allowable norms within society.
+There are laws, physics and lore behind the origin and operation of the Timeline. You can find that on the [[Timeline Properties]] page. What one needs to know is that the timeline acts as a buffer system in which the unbearable and destabilizing excesses of late capitalism and techno-accelerationsim are shunted off into Starholder to keep our reality from crashing. This new world is disposable, and its purpose is to take in all the trash that would destroy ours.
-The one major divergence Starholder makes from our current reality is the introduction of alien life into our solar system. First contact comes to Starholder because we want to explore a timeline that is dealing with an event that irrevocably alters the course of human history and reorients society. It is simply more enjoyable to explore a world that is turned on its head, then to follow the corrosion of our current trajectory into some gloomy dystopian endpoint.
+These butterfly effects compound, pushing divergence further as each new one is overlaid on the last. As a consequence, the Starholder Timeline lives the future faster, harder and is forced to confront events that reorient humankind on a far too frequent basis. Chaos abounds, but naïve techno optimism drives its inhabitants because bleak dystopias are played out and boring.
-Starholder starts in 1999 with the creation of the Starholder Institute by the comedian Dan Aykroyd. The Starholder Institute is unaware that it is the founding event in an alternate timeline, but its membership also acts as the governing body of the art project, placing it in a role where it must be both the actor and the audience, player and game.
+== Structure ==
+The Timeline covers one hundred years of imagined history, from 1999 to 2099 broken into periods. Each is an exploration of a technological package and its effect on society & culture.
-The objective of the timeline is twofold:
+* The End Of History (1999 - 2016)
+* Networked Life Intensifies (2017 - 2033)
+* The Great Disruption (2034 - 2049)
+* Headlong Into The [[Hyperreal]] (2050 - 2069)
+* The [[Second Moon]] Event (2070-2079)
+* The Impending Collapse (2080 – 2099)
+The goal of the project is to tell the stories of each period and weave them together into a larger overarching narrative capable of delivering meaning while also hitting people in the feels. Starholder takes a bottom-up approach to worldbuilding, using stories, characters, places, and things as scaffolding with an expectation that over time a grand narrative emerges on top of it.
-# Render up a 100 year history that becomes an important myth within our culture.
+It starts with text as the foundation, but it is text that is meant to be rendered up continually over time into new forms of networked media. Think of the words as the substrate on which the world is built and then rebuilt, authored by humans and AI. Starholder is as much a fictional timeline as it is a training model for future creation.
-# Create a historical arc that does not end in failure and collapsing upon itself in its year 2099.
-These objectives operate on two levels:
+== Objectives ==
-* The first act of completing rendering is a goal of the art project itself. Can it capture the necessary attention of others to see the timeline built out and its story told to completion?
+The objective of the timeline is twofold:
-* The second objective is to deliver a satisfying ending where the Starholder Timeline overcomes the odds of failing and finds a viable alternative to the dystopias assumed by late-stage capitalism. The construction of the Starholder conceit stacks the deck against this happening, as the CCE is removing all the really gnarly stuff from our timeline and dumping it into Starholder to deal with. Think of it this way, if you are pessimistic about our survival, then Starholder as it twice as bad.
-Starholder begins as a timeline seeking its text, but it is a networked multimedia project. Rendering up is central to the construction of the Starholder universe. While it will begin with fiction, the timeline can be expressed in any number of other media formats. The vision is that the Starholder timeline contains enough creative work within it that when technology is ready, it can act as the source material for AI-driven simulations of an alternate universe.
+# Render up a 100 year fictional history that becomes an important myth within our culture.
+# Create a historical arc that does not end in failure and collapse upon itself in its year 2099.
-Rendering in the context of this project means that the stories, objects and history of Starholder gradually come into focus across a variety of media. There is no requirement to deliver completed works of art into the Starholder universe. Things may be begun and abandoned. They may be picked up by others to carry on or they may just exist as incomplete artifacts which can be drawn on as source material for other works within the timeline.
+These objectives operate on two levels:
-Rendering also means things may be started and left fallow until a later date with their outlines acting as the scaffolding for the larger arc, only to be painted in when the larger story is better understood. This is both an invitation for others to contribute without placing a high entry bar into the project, and the founder's own desire to dance around a multitude of different storylines simultaneously. Rendering up as a style of construction is also a gamble that generative AI will advance to the point where it can paint in abandoned works, and the spark of human creation is the valuable seed it needs for that task.
-The central gambit of the art project is that networked media is going to lead to a shift in how entertainment operates from passive consumption to active co-creation. In this regard, we are heavily influenced by McLuhan on technology & media and Arendt's Human Condition when it comes to the re-emergence of public life. Our belief is that late capitalism has stolen the role of the individual in public life and left them with only consumerism as a means of expression. We believe that networked media is a starting point for the reclamation of expression. By telling stories together where there is no fixed ending, we can express values that matter to us and recapture agency and meaning from a world that only wants to sell us luxury goods.
+* Can Starholder capture the necessary attention of others to see the timeline built out and its story told to completion in a way that achieves cultural importance?
+* Deliver a satisfying ending where the Starholder Timeline overcomes the odds of failing and finds a viable alternative to the dystopias assumed by late-stage capitalism. Can we fulfill our debt to our audience by saving Starholder from its planned destruction?