Persistent Worlds: A solo show by Alice Bucknell
Curatorial Text by Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás
Worlds persist even if no one is watching. In game design, a “persistent world” is a virtual environment that continues to exist, evolve, and record changes beyond a single player’s session. Originating in multiplayer online games, it enables actions—whether by players, AI, or programmed systems—to leave lasting effects on the game space, creating the sense of a living world unfolding with or without direct interaction. Weather patterns may shift, economies fluctuate, and landscapes transform in response to collective activity.
Alice Bucknell’s (they/them) computer-generated environments and narratives may not be persistent worlds in the technical sense, yet they enact a form of persistence by continually provoking change and urging us to reconsider our own life-worlds. As their various narratives unfold, they traverse scales from the subatomic to the cosmic, giving voice to multiple protagonists—human and more-than-human alike. These speculative worlds draw on interviews, historical events, and existing environments. They are reconfiguring the discussions to imagine climate interventions, ecological experiments, and the possible consequences of past mistakes. Always balancing between fact and fiction, they open windows onto alternative futures.
The solo show Persistent Worlds presents four works developed by Bucknell over the last two years:
Nightcrawlers (2025), two-player cooperative game;
Small Void (2025), two-player cooperative game;
Staring at the Sun (2024–2025), sci-fi documentary (two channels, 40 min), metal sculptures;
The Alluvials (2023), 4K single-channel video, 38 min.
All pivot around the same question: “What kinds of worlds do we inhabit, and how can they be changed for the better?”
This is not a question that yields a straightforward answer—it demands a longer and oftentimes participatory meandering. The conditions we face today—shaped by the rise of artificial intelligence, the climate and ecological crisis, and growing geopolitical conflicts—demand a forward-looking political approach. It is no longer enough just to represent, observe, or criticize. If we want to keep this world liveable, we share the responsibility to create alternatives. We are obliged to imagine and model worlds that are more sustainable than the ones we rely on now.
Alice Bucknell addresses these topical issues via digital worldbuilding. It refers to the creation of fictional or virtual worlds within digital environments, found across genres of video games, Virtual Reality, cinema, literature, or scientific modelling. This practice not only imagines but forecasts alternative scenarios, as in the video work Staring at the Sun, which examines climate modelling as a form of speculative world-making. Similarly, The Alluvials depicts a speculative scenario and thus intertwines fiction with fact-based potentials from the artist’s own research.
Both works hover delicately between documentation and prophecy, each illuminating urgent concerns of our time. Unfolding across multiple venues tied to geoengineering, Staring at the Sun confronts the very notion of Earth’s computability: the illusion that a master algorithm or singular solution could resolve the entangled crises of climate change dissolves before us.
If this realization feels stark, The Alluvials offers a counterpoint of solace, foregrounding nature’s adaptability and resilience through its critical lens. Here, amid the scars of the Anthropocene, the habitats of more-than-human actors are both threatened and reimagined. The work becomes not only a confrontation with ecological disruption, but also a recognition of Indigenous knowledge and more-than-human perspectives—voices that insist on coexistence, continuity, and renewal.
Crucial to speculative fiction, design, and interactive media, digital worldbuilding provides platforms for exploration, narrative development, and user interaction. It is a systematic method for constructing immersive, coherent universes—shaping not only virtual spaces but our understanding of our own. Originally an analogue process of inventing worlds with their own rules, cultures, and histories, worldbuilding has expanded with digital tools and interactivity. This is especially true in video games, where players can move through and transform these environments, just like in Bucknell’s two-player cooperative games, Small Void and Nightcrawlers.
Both games extend an invitation not only to contemplate the unimaginable but to inhabit it. Small Void translates the elusive language of quantum phenomena into gameplay: here we slip either into the role of matter-annihilating antimatter, or vice versa—we become particles that entangle, traversing a multiplicity of worlds in motion.
In Nightcrawlers, the scale shifts: from the infinitesimal to the ecological. What is it like to be a bat, or a flower blooming in moonlight? Beyond introducing us to the hidden lives of nocturnal pollinators, the game also stages, through digital means, a manifestation on the mind–body problem.
Today, worldbuilding plays a central role from the vast interconnected universes of entertainment franchises to critical and alternative practices in global popular culture. In literature, Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler, among others, have imagined futures and parallel realities that interrogate social, political, and ecological conditions. In contemporary art, worldbuilding appears in diverse forms: Ian Cheng’s Emissaries trilogy of digital simulations (2015–2017); VR landscapes exploring ancient ecologies by Jakob Kudsk Steensen; games questioning agency and identity by Sahej Rahal and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley; live-action roleplays (LARPs) by OMSK Social Club.
Bucknell uses digital worldbuilding to explore the affective potential of video games. Their work probes the limits of scientific knowledge and systems thinking. They embrace the strange possibilities of play and the ecological dimensions of games that unsettle binaries such as natural/synthetic and self/environment.
Through Alice Bucknell’s four most recent projects, the exhibition Persistent Worlds suggests that digital worldbuilding does more than mirror reality: it unravels and unsettles it, opening space for speculation and for scenarios that might shape our shared future. Worldbuilding, then, is not merely a tool of fiction-making but a political gesture—an act of imagining worlds oriented toward societal change.
