5th December 2024, at 18:00 Harrow Campus, University of Westminster (room TBC)
Photogrammetry is a ‘reality capture’ technique positioned by game engines as enabling scalable worldbuilding that automates labours of modelling and rigging. Tracing the legacies of racial classification and extractivism in biometric and environmental capture, this lecture contends that the base unit of worldbuilding is not content but assets. Assets are valued not primarily for their tradability in marketplaces or usability in pipelines, but for their embedding within tools as infrastructure. Assets are made to keep – this components-first approach consolidates value for platforms not by building, but by disaggregating worlds and dissolving labour into their constituent components for speculative forms of reassembly.
Dr. Aleena Chia is a Lecturer in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She researches video game production cultures and digital wellness practices to understand how technologies of automation and ideologies of self-optimisation impact inequalities in cultural production. Website: aleenachia.org
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