Encountering
In a dark room on the ground floor of the Australian Centre for Moving Images (ACMI), cross-cut by two tall projector screens, I first came across The Grannies (2019). It’s a 16 minute short film with travelogue-style narration, following a group of four players, Andrew Brophy, Marigold ‘Goldie’ Bartlett, Ian MacLarty and Kalonica Quigley in their exploration out of the bounds of the world in the game Red Dead Online.
At the edge of the world, they exploited a bug to glitch out of constructed expanses of the world, and into the rogue spaces that are the vestiges of the coding and development behind the game.
Each of the creators are game developers and artists in their own way. In their artist statement, they speak of these lands as “the seams of the virtual world, its scaffolding, the materiality of how it was made.” Ironically in the spirit of the frontier world that Red Dead Redemption draws its aesthetics from, The Grannies follows the group’s exploration in this tentatively held-together space: textures are rendered in a blur, geography loses reason.
A row of tetrahedral pyramids, with low-rendered gravel cast on their surfaces, appears without explanation. The space between dunes is vivisected by a drop into the ocean, which takes a real-world hour for the avatar to reach, glitching into a void beneath the ground in the meanwhile.
It filled me, strangely, with a wistful appreciation for the beauty of the natural world. These foreign, nonsensical constructions - a chunk of rock suspended in the sky, dawn seen through an ill-rendered mountain - were strange and fantastical. They had in them a touch of the sublime.
The last minute of the film cuts off the bounds of exploration abruptly, with the text: “On the 10th of September 2019 Rockstar Games released patch 1.11 for Red Dead Online Included in this patch was the following update… “Players will now recover quicker from situations like ragdolling, combat diving and slope sliding” Since this update the Grannies and other players are no longer able to travel outside of the map.”
Rediscovery
I re-encountered The Grannies on my second layover during a return trip to London. Surrounded by these hulking, sterile, white, machines, with the thrum of an Airbus A380 engine pulsing through the thick-paned airport windows, the wondrous, illogical landscape the film presented was movingly different from the alienating architecture around me.
I think a large part of why The Grannies resonates so much with me is its love of technological debris - these useless stretches of digital space, the shameful refuse of a heavily curated world. As the ACMI description puts it, “the unexpected terrain and landmark… only matter because they provoked curiosity and emotion in the people who found them.”
This piece is a somewhat fragmented ode to these pieces of useless technology, like the terrain explored in The Grannies. It’s a love letter to finicky devices, to outlandish technological creations, to digital spaces made purely for play and experimentation.
It reminds me of the ethos of steampunk articulated in a magazine I read a while back. The first Feature article, What then, is Steampunk? is a ballad to the “living monsters of technology”; these beasts of human invention take on a life of their own. “The machine,” the article argues, “must be liberated from efficiency and designed by desire and dreams.”
Efficiency is a hallmark of commercial consideration - to be efficient is to reduce the costs of production. To be efficient is to be useful to firms in maximising profit. To be efficient is to be perfectly designed, fully controlled, and in many ways, limiting.
Not only is steampunk an aesthetic sensibility that “revels in the concrete reality of technology”, accepting its existence without capitulating to it as a necessarily dystopian tool of surveillance and profit, but it is also a political philosophy. Its punk roots are evident in its “aggressive, do-it-yourself ethic” - self-designed engineering, scavenged scrap materials and a deep level of personalisation are all characteristic of steampunk.
Howl’s moving castle, the titular construction in the 2005 Studio Ghibli film, is a prime example of the steampunk aesthetic: held together by magic and hodge-podge repairs, the castle is functional, charmingly ugly, and has an animated spirit of its own, interacting with its occupants as a character instead of mere lifeless setting.
Envisioning
This is the kind of technological development I’d like to see. Admittedly, this is a highly idealistic vision - for one, I personally lack the knowledge of technology required to design things myself, although it’s something I’m trying to work on.
The hold of conglomerates over the technological world is also far-reaching: with convenient features such as the Apple ecosystem, shared digital workspaces, and endless integrated AI tools, it seems like a straight up bad decision for most individuals to adopt this ethos. Not to mention that the efficiency which drives technological design is not limited to that field: efficiency, as a principle, drives almost every facet of our economic reality.
I was talking to a friend about this idea, and she also pointed out that most people just don’t have the skill to engage in this ‘do-it-yourself ethic’; even if they recognise their deficiency in this area, there’s often little need or motivation to learn about the inner mechanisms of devices, and build up this kind of practical knowledge.
She also noted that this ‘steampunk’ world is difficult to envision: does it mean that we purposely build defunct technologies? Do we embrace imperfection at all costs? How do we achieve the kind of global knowledge-bank to make this a reality?
These are still questions I’m still wondering about. I’ll admit again I know woefully little about how technology works: tech decentralisation, personally-owned internet spaces, closer interpersonal online networks are more amorphous ideas to me than political goals with concrete, visible steps.
The most realistic strategy I can envision at this point is something close to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s ideas of survival, resilience and adaptability amongst capitalist ruins in The Mushroom at the End of the World. With increasing economic precarity and economic disintegration, Tsing argues that the resilience of matsutake mushrooms, and the types of economic and social assemblages that appear around it can offer inspiration for a renewed approach to the world.
In the abstract, what I want is technology that is owned by its users. I want technology that is deeply functional for the people who need them, technology that is intelligible to as many people as possible in how it operates, technology that can be used as a space for play and online experimentation, rather than commercial profit. I want technology that is useful for individuals, not for organisations. I want technology with endless bounds of exploration, like the beyond-world vistas of The Grannies.
One of the artists in The Grannies, Goldie Bartlett, comments in the film that, in Red Dead Online, “we feel like children a lot of the time when we play this. We just make our own fun with it - fun that’s not designed.” This is what I most want from technology - to have the tools to appreciate and play within it, and to have the opportunities to do so.