About Starholder

Starholder is an art project exploring networked media and generative storytelling.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The objective of the timeline is twofold:

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

These objectives operate on two levels:

• 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 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.

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. 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.