world-fleshing: an interview with Georgina Voss (part 1)

Starting an interview series like this lets you do two amazing things: first of all, it gives you license to pester people you've admired from a distance with the questions you've always wanted to ask them, but secondly, it gives you the opportunity to do exactly the same thing to people you've been friends with for years.

And if you're lucky enough to be friends with people like Georgina Voss, you may find yourself realising that, while you probably have a fairly good abstract idea of what they do—something along the lines of "artist, writer, educator", perhaps—the detail of it has gone rather underexplored...

After an introduction that gives some insights into the working life of a very hard-to-classify creative person, this first part of my interview with George sees her drawing a distinction between worldbuilding and world-fleshing—which is related to, but perhaps not quite the same as, the difference between foresight and science fiction?—and discussing what it is that an artist does when trying to engage with systems and futures through speculation and making.

—pgr

getting to know you

Paul Graham Raven: What does it say on your business card, if indeed you have one?

Georgina Voss: I do not have a business card. If I did, it would probably just have my name and then a link to my website, because I like the mystery of that. If you've got even the standard three-worder that I generally have—which is “artist, writer, educator”, or sometimes “artist, writer, creative director”—then there’s that sort of “actress, model ,whatever” nature to it...

That's a bit of a weasel answer, but unless you're trying to pack three hundred words onto the business card in tiny, tiny mouse text then no, it is just my name and my website, I’m afraid.

PGR: We both came up in the era of not entirely ironically saying “oh, just Google me...”

GV: I have a very distinctive name! I think there's only another couple of mes out there... I think one works in marketing and one is a singer, and there might be one who’s an Australian sportswoman? So googling me will probably get you to me in that way. But I like the idea of being able to be pointed somewhere else as well, I think.

When Moo was still doing their thing, I had a series of business cards made with my own photos on the back of them, which I really, really liked. It felt like its own version of a tarot deck: depending on the context in which we've met, you might get a photo that I’d taken at the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, or you might get a photo that I'd taken of another bit of infrastructure. So it was kind of the image on the back that did a lot of the heavy lifting, rather than the kind of that weird, short, three-word description.

PGR: What would you say is the really big thing that's been occupying you work wise over the last year or so?

GV: So the biggest thing was a performance piece I did at Transmediale in Berlin in February 2023: a half-hour, one-person theatre piece. It was the first time that I'd written just for myself in that way, and at that length, something that was entirely performance. The stuff I'd done before was either shorter, or operated in a different way and for much smaller audiences. This one was essentially a horror story about someone who goes for a job interview at a large company, and it turns out—spoilers!—the company is not what it seems, and has its own demonic qualities, and our protagonists move through the different layers of hell to get to the bottom.

It came from thinking about images, how we read images and where they come from, about the language of images and what we see, how images can be digitally constructed, and their politics as well. I had an [old-school] overhead projector where I was drawing [directly] on to the screen, and using bits of cardboard to lay out my case. It was talking about high technology—very high technology!—in as low-tech a way as I could. All this was projected onto the back screen, so that I was making my own set at the same time as I was performing the piece.

It was a huge thing and I'm really proud of it, and I'm really proud of myself for getting it through in that way.

PGR: What was the most daunting aspect of that for you?

GV: Not the performance, actually! There's a difference between writing something which is designed to be read and writing something which is designed to be performed. When you're writing for reading, you can move between things, you can build up structure, you can set things out. But a script doesn't actually have to have any words at all—this is incredibly obvious to the scriptwriters and the theater makers and the filmmakers out there!—[in order] to build and to bake in the performance bit in the stage directions for yourself.

I worked with a dramaturg for the first time and she was amazing, really helped me get from that point of “what is this thing that is being spoken” to “how is this actually a performance”, a theatrical piece in its own right. Very much the very, very steep learning curve, to give a sense of how that would be different to anything that I'd done before.

PGR: So what's been going on in your world in the last month or so?

GV: The big thing is that my book Systems Ultra came out, actually two weeks ago today. No, three weeks ago today, I think? I've lost track of time.

[Editor’s note: with regard to losing track of time, this interview was recorded way back in February 2024. It was meant to be published in a different medium at a much earlier date, but sometimes things just don’t work the way you planned them. My apologies to George for that, and my thanks for her forbearance.]

This is published with Verso, and it has been a long time in the making. I pitched it at the end of 2018, got the contract at the beginning of 2019, with the idea that I would have it finished by late 2021, early 2022... and then, as we know, the world set itself on fire and everything else. A lot of the work and the research that I wanted to do had to be reshaped or reconfigured.

But it is now here, with a very bright yellow cover! It’s genuinely incredible to have it in the world. I've been doing a bunch of really lovely events, doing launches and lectures and interviews. It's a different experience to, say, performance work, which is liminal. A book is for life, not just for Christmas… so this thing is now out there and existing, and will continue to exist. More than anything else, it’s just a release. It’s like that bit of my brain... you know, one bead of the abacus has now been moved across to the other side.

PGR: That reminds me of finishing my PhD thesis. You finally get that thing done and you realize, oh, wow—half of my brain was just completely full of this architecture, which I can now put down. But actually getting it out, getting over it, it’s kind of a different story, right? It’s not just like, “oh, I finished the book, on to the next thing”.

GV: The way that it has felt for me for a long time is like: you have a piano suspended over your head, but you don't realize you've got this piano suspended over your head until one day the piano is [no longer] suspended over your head. And then you're like, oh, okay—that’s what it feels like, when it’s not there any more! But you know, there’s still kind of the ghost of the piano.

It's been interesting, talking about it in the past couple of weeks, coming back to and revisiting all those things that had been so present for such a long time: thinking on how to write about this, is this the right way? How are these things being represented? Obviously, there’s a very different relation to the finished thing than there is to the thing when you're actually making it. Now it has readers, it has people responding to it... whereas previously it's just you, battling around in your own skull, wondering what on earth is going on and will anyone care, apart from you, about which order these things have to go in.

PGR: Yelling into the void, and the void is you. Just as a side question: are you starting to think, well, maybe I should suspend another piano over my head?

GV: Oh yeah, the piano shop has notes from me. The folks are bringing their trucks and their cranes to get the piano—several pianos!—rigged up. Well, not yet rigged up, but definitely that process is in operation. Nothing quite as fixed as the last piano, it might be more of a harpsichord, it might be a theremin... but something, something bulky is definitely starting to ascend towards the skies.

what do we mean when we say 'worldbuilding'?

PGR: If you hear me say “worldbuilding”, what do you take it to mean?

GV: It's a word that carries a lot of weight, and there's something about it that makes me think in two directions: either this very foresight-y idea, building out a world so you can think through it, or the more fun world of sci-fi. Or even the world of fiction [more broadly]: kind of fleshing something out, so that you can put something in it that will live there, or at least exist there in some way or another.

PGR: You draw a distinction between the worldbuilding of futurists and the worldbuilding of science fiction writers. What do you think the difference is?

GV: I think the ends to which they're put. Foresight serves a purpose, right? You're doing something to an end, which is to map out something that may have a policy implication to it, or an institutional element to it. You're doing that to figure out a strategic way forward; that might be around levers of policy, it might be about actionability. There's a very functional end to it—even if the functional end itself might be new forms of public engagement. So there's that kind of actionable element to it: you're trying to engage with complexity in all its forms, but there is a definite point that you have nailed in on, that you or the client or the government or whoever really wanted to dig into.

For science fiction writers, meanwhile, in all of our many forms, we're writing to entertain! I sound like such a wanker saying that, but hopefully someone has a good time reading your book, watching your film, listening to your soundscape, engaging with your durational performance piece. There's a thing that's being created for an audience to engage with.

I will be really clear: there's something that's almost always really hard when you're talking about this kind of work, of what it should be or what it might be, because it is ambiguous and weird, and the idea that you should get anything [in particular] from these types of works makes me want to stick my head into a piano. But there is something where you're fleshing out this world... I mean, I would almost say world-fleshing for sci-fi, which is maybe even a worse word [than worldbuilding], but I think it's more accurate. Your world, you're doing this fleshing out, to kind of locate something within it.

Here’s one way I've seen these two things be different. I was teaching a workshop last night at Central Saint Martins, with students from a wide range of backgrounds across design and art and innovation and lots of things, a nice interdisciplinary mix of undergraduates and postgraduates, about thirty of us in a room together. When you run workshops, [sometimes] at the end you ask participants to kind of give you a story, to flesh out: tell us what is happening here, give us a story to help us think.

Oftentimes these can fall into the very strategic camp, which almost feels like design personas: I am telling you a story about supply chains, but it's not really a story, you wouldn't buy it and read it. You wouldn't hope that it wins the Arthur C Clarke award! It's a very functional thing.

And then there are some stories that are great: you have all the elements of performance and presence and genre, and good writing (or no writing, or whatever it is) but this time you're actually being entertained. You're like, god, I would love to see this space opera about a Samsung smart TV that's like gone out into the world and something, something, something… turn it into a ten-part series for Amazon. Brilliant!

And of course there's overlap there, of course—it would be wrong to say there isn't a structure or intent behind creative work, or to say there isn't an element of performance and affect around foresight or futures work. But they exist in different spaces and they do—they can do different things.

PGR: Okay. So primarily a difference of ends rather than means.

GV: I think a little of both. I think that's the crafting that comes into it as well. There is spillover between these two spaces: you do get folks who are extremely skilled film-makers, writers, sound artists, what have you, working within foresight spaces. And there are those who bring those [foresight] skills into stuff that might be more easily called entertainment… but there are also those who don't. Not all science fiction creators would be any good at foresight or futures work, and not all foresight and futures experts would be any good at doing science fiction work. It's not a given, but it's also not a clean separation.

PGR: When talking about science fiction writers, you used the “we” pronoun. If that's a role that you see yourself as inhabiting, it might be fun to unpack that in the course of answering this next question!

So: how does worldbuilding relate to your own work or practice? Is it a thing that you do? Is it a thing of other peoples that you engage with? What is worldbuilding to you in your work?

GV: God, that's a stretchy question, isn't it? Well, again, worldbuilding feels like it has a technics to it. To return to the performance piece I did last year: there was a definite sense of thinking about characters, who the protagonists were, who the antagonists were, and particularly [what was] this environment that I was moving them through. But that was almost set at the very back wall, figuratively speaking, and became something to build the other things onto: what the affect of this thing was, what the language that was being used around it was, how you get the audience to come with you through the performance and to have a stable backdrop there.

But also for that kind of work, there's also this kind of unfolding that comes with it, where the reader or the audience is kind of pulling together their own part of what is going on, rather than it being so very foregrounded. I’ve always liked work that allows for that stretching, but also that kind of uncertainty as well: the piecing-together, but maybe the pieces don't hold together? It's less about having a very fixed idea of, like, “yes, definitely, this is how we would have these different forms of something something something”, and more a question of what the engagement with those forms actually is.

In my teaching, there is definitely the element of asking students to think about the context and culture and systems and structures of the places that they are doing work for, whether they're art students or design students. If they are going to be building something or making something, [then] how are they considering the space, the culture, the time, the world that it is in? And so maybe less the worldbuilding and more the world-fleshing… a kind of patting around the edges to see where the soft parts are, but in a way that recognises there is a world there. There is something for them to engage with, should they want to engage with it, and should it be necessary for them to engage with it... and I think that's probably where those two things meet together.

I came from a science background, then from an anthropology background, then moved into art and design, and with some policy thrown in there for good measure. So a lot of the work I did initially was very much figuring out and engaging with the material and the biological qualities of the world, and then with the political and economic and cultural qualities of the world, and then you figure out what are you going to do with that—you know, if you're going to make something with that, how do you bring those kind of those bits together?

Those are the things that come to bear on making things, whether writing or performances or other forms of work. But for my students, it's [a matter of] bringing that back to them. They are highly skilled in graphic design, they are highly skilled in engineering, they are highly skilled in many things! And if you've had the focus on those particular skills for such a long time, and on those ways of knowing the world, I think that's crucial. What does it mean, if you now start to want to look outside of that, or conceive of the world or the worlds that you're in? How do you bring that back to making things? But that kind of making, engaging, creating, doing part of it—that's where worldbuilding comes in.

auto-anthro-ethno

PGR: You mentioned anthropology as one of your earlier incarnations, and it sounds to me that what you're describing is almost like teaching people to auto-ethnographise their work...

GV: It always sounds a bit Hannibal Lecter... you know, I'm going to find the quote so I can actually read it out to you.

[googles it, returns, laughing] OK, maybe this is not quite what I was thinking, from thought leader Hannibal Lecter! But the quote I was thinking of [fromSilence of the Lambs] is:

First principles, Clarice—simplicity! Read Marcus Aurelius: ‘of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself, what is its nature?’

And then he gets on to talking about what do we covet? We covet what we see every day.

So there's that paying attention thing that comes in, it's maybe less autoethnography… one of the things I've seen with my students over the years, [is that] they come in with very big ideas, like climate change, crime, ants—you know, something massive. And what you do—or what I have done, or what we do, in different kind of institutions, different spaces—is [to try to encourage them to ask] “OK, what is that?” What is the thing that's actually in this—is it something that comes from you? Is it something you've seen? What's the element of it? It's that boiling down, trying to get it to a place of not just the massive overwhelming thing, but more what is it? What is its nature? What do we see every day?

And that doesn't always have to be the case, you know—a huge amount of work doesn't come from those kind of first principles, doesn't end up with those first principles. But if you're asking how to engage with these forms of complexity, with these forms of worlds, then what is it?

I did a couple of events with Rachel O'Dwyer, and one of the things we were talking about was the impossibility of trying to describe financial systems. In one of the discussions that she'd had, Bill Maurer had said that you don't ask someone to describe money or finances; you ask them instead how they've paid for their wedding, or you ask them how they bought their house. That's how you get that kind of first-person engagement with their way through it—which is not going to be complete, and necessarily it will never be complete, but it's the human scale.

There are obviously problems with storytelling and narrative, but it's that first-person way through—which is very much not like, you know, “I am One Man, and I kind of Neo-in-the-Matrix my way into seeing Everything.” It's more like: what happened when you tried to pay for your wedding? Did you borrow money? Did you have money put aside? Did you realize that all the wedding venues suddenly put their prices up three times when you said it's for a wedding? Did you have to try and figure out numbers three months ahead of time? All this kind of stuff starts to come into play when you ask that kind of question, rather than saying “tell me about the system”. So that part of it, I think, is maybe the autoethnography: what happened when this happened?

PGR: This echoes strongly a concern that emerges from my own work, and particularly stuff dealing with infrastructures and climate change (which I have argued are basically two sides of the same coin): how do we move from the systemic abstract to the concrete particular?

We [as academics or scholars] have the sometimes dubious privilege of having been trained and practiced at thinking in the abstract; it's not that people aren't capable of it, but it's a muscle that needs to be trained and worked, to be easily made use of. So you can't just go straight to “tell me about the system”. Instead, you go in through concretization—in fictional terms, don't tell me “the city was vast and crowded with traffic”, show me that: give me the sounds and the smells and the sensations and so on and so forth.

GV: You can set the stage by saying “the city was vast”, or “they had lived under neocommunism for 3000 years”—but that also might not be very entertaining. What are you doing with your audience, with your reader? You know, “a long time ago in a galaxy far far away”: it's like you're setting up this mythic status of this thing. With a statement like “they had lived under neocommunism for three thousand years”, you're going to forget that in the first three seconds, but it's more to give you a status: you're showing that this city has been historicized in this way, or is seen in that way.

There are tensions between how much attention can you pay to certain elements. What does a shorthand achieve, like “they lived under neocommunism for 3000 years”, as opposed to, you know, “Jeff Alpha 3 tried to buy his bread that morning”? And there's a stage where you're writing to work it through, the many thousands of drafts that won't actually get anywhere, but they do the work of getting you to a point where you can articulate what you want to say in the way that you want to. But then there’s the thing that then gets, made, printed, processed, shown, sonified... and then there could be a thing when you're using this in, say, a collective environment, where it's more participatory: it might be a thing that people think through or think with and do other forms of work that come with it as well.

So that was probably a very long way of saying “yes” to show-don't-tell, but also saying that telling can be a form of showing as well.

PGR: Outside the flamewars over show-don’t-tell, I think most people recognize they're two different tools. It's like the difference between a wide panning shot in cinema and a close-up focus shot: they do two different things. Sometimes you want to do that thing, sometimes you want to do that other thing; knowing when to use each of them is the key.

GV: Yeah, right.

In the second part of this interview, the topics already discussed get blended in with an exploration of Georgina’s book, Systems Ultra. Keep an eye out for it in the weeks ahead!

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