Papers by Katarina Ranković
PhD Thesis | Goldsmiths College, 2023
Scripting for Agency presents a new theory of character, whether fictional, human or corporate, i... more Scripting for Agency presents a new theory of character, whether fictional, human or corporate, in which it can be understood as an attractor in a behavioural space.
To use a more familiar analogy, character is to behaviour what climate is to weather, since a climate “attracts” weather to fall into familiar patterns in the space of meteorological possibility. Implied within this theory of character is also a theory of “the human being,” which, by virtue of being capable of performing behaviours in patterned combinations, can be understood as a character substratum, or character-playing machine. Specifically, the human being is versed in playing out the kinds of characters that are commonly recognised as “personality.”
Following this, the thesis posits a second theory: that “the social agent” can be understood as a character (or relatively narrow family of characters) which the human being consistently adopts when it enters the social milieu. Given that the human being is a social animal and spends much time in the social milieu, the social agent and the human being appear, most of the time, to be the same thing. However, the fact that the social agent represents a relatively narrow group of characters within a much vaster character repertoire suggests that the human being is oddly overqualified for society: it is capable of playing out a far greater diversity of characters than it typically does. This attenuation of human character range, or “bureaucratisation of spirit,” may have evolved to enable social collaboration, as evidenced by social practices and aesthetics of authenticity that police human character variability.
This raises questions with potentially far-reaching social and ethical implications in areas such as politics of identity, human rights law and AI alignment efforts: are there any benefits to embracing the character diversity of the human being? Would a greater acceptance of personal diversity endanger, or enrich, social complexity?
Art, a discipline that is characterised by running experiments in social contracts, aesthetics and states of being on its audience, is precisely suited to the task of probing this question. From within the spiritual laboratory of a performance practice in which I am possessed by characters, and by drawing on Daniel Dennett’s evolutionary theory of agency, Erving Goffman’s theatrical framework for self-presentation, Alfred Gell’s theory of art and agency, and Miloš and Slavica Ranković’s work on cultural formulas, the thesis demonstrates that cultivating personal diversity can enhance critical thinking, engender more creative explorations of aesthetic space, and bring new philosophical intuitions to one's everyday experience of selfhood.
Unpublished Experimental Report, 2023
Following anthropological evidence correlating certain kinds of visual representations with lay t... more Following anthropological evidence correlating certain kinds of visual representations with lay theories of selfhood (e.g., correlating vessel-like shapes with the 'interiority' that is sometimes associated with the self), this paper reports on a preliminary study that asked participants to draw what they thought a 'diagram of the self' would look like. The resulting drawings are analysed for their common features and what these might reveal about participants' underlying theories about what 'self' is and how it works. Despite the fact that the study was only preliminary and warrants further refinement in its methods, it resulted in a surprisingly diverse set of drawings communicating a rich amount of information, suggesting that visual methods such as this diagramming task may be a promising way of deriving lay theories of selfhood. Finally, I consider the theoretical possibility of using AI text-to-image generation as a proxy for human-generated visual outputs and thus as an alternative way of deriving lay theories of selfhood without human participants.
Goldsmiths College PhD Art Publication, 2021
What do we imagine when we think about the shape of a
thinking thing? It’s far from trivial. Just... more What do we imagine when we think about the shape of a
thinking thing? It’s far from trivial. Just think of other
instances where shape has turned out to matter. The
shape of an atom spells out its very properties and functions,
and our models of it have had to shift and iterate
over time to accommodate new knowledge about its
behaviours. Before the architecture of neurons and their
galaxy-scale interconnectivity was revealed, the brain
seemed insignificant to a study of mind. The study of
something so elementary as shape even has the potential
to make some of the most hitherto relevant debates
redundant.
For example, people used to ask whether
the Earth was finite or infinite, whether you could travel
in one direction forever, or risked falling off one of its
edges. Although it is hard for us to put ourselves in their
shoes today, this is an entirely commonsensical argument
to have if you assume the world to be flat. The concept
of a round Earth came to be a radical transformation, or
transcendence, of that debate.
It is revealing to observe in so plain an example how a
question can contain within itself a misleading vocabulary
ill-fitted to the phenomenon at hand. This is because it is
a question that prematurely answers itself by way of an
underlying assumption, curtailing access to a more enabling
inquiry. What if something akin to a ‘round Earth’
could be applied to today’s debates about agents, selves, or
thinking things – debates which manifest diversely, from
discussing artificial intelligence, to negotiating politics of
identity? Just like the finite/infinite earth example, the
things people do and say in relation to thinking things
reveals that they already have a certain shape for them in
mind, whether or not they reflect upon it.
MA Dissertation | Central Saint Martins, 2018
This paper takes its departure from philosophies of subjectivity and agency that have emerged fro... more This paper takes its departure from philosophies of subjectivity and agency that have emerged from poststructural discourses, and meditates on how their theories might reimagine the identities of artist and artwork alike, and the relationship between them.
It begins by considering philosophy as, not only background context, but an artistic material, that can be pliable and instrumental to an artist. Introducing performative accounts of identity
formation, from Michel Foucault through to Jacques Derrida, I reimagine my own subjectivity as interpellated by a network of sensitive relations, and begin to visualise my agency as ‘disturbances in the causal milieu’ (Gell, 1998). I then argue that these theories of agency are applicable to artworks, or fictional agencies, and not only human subjects. An expanded
concept of the line (in a drawing, a sound, a gesture) is introduced to explore an artwork’s capacity to inhabit and exhibit ‘character’, which is contagious and transferable between agents, whether ‘artificial’ or ‘organic’. From there the paper becomes a platform to consider an experimental art practice, taking a novel I am writing as a proposition for such an art
experiment, where the distinctions between the agencies of real maker and artificial character are blurred and challenged.
This leads me to conclude in asking questions I may previously not have thought askable, such as: to what extent is something as close to home as the human mind, written; inscribed by ancient grooves of genetic memory, articulated by chains of DNA text and ventriloquisedby a culture of stories? And, is it possible to write a person?
My research addresses how art, narrative and fiction might contribute to and extend contemporary studies of subjectivity and self-representation.
Journal of Art Writing by Students, 2018
This story about a drawing narrates the inner world of the page and its populace of lines, their ... more This story about a drawing narrates the inner world of the page and its populace of lines, their struggles and their peace, and how all this internal drama hangs contingently on the vast physical and historical world that it is a part of. The story is extrapolated from video essays in which I film myself hurriedly attempting to verbalize fragments of the accelerated decision-making process accentuated by my flitting wrist while drawing. Talking Drawing is a method of historical restoration taking place at the site of the moving hand that questions what its choreographic inheritance has to say about the plethora of semantic decisions explicit in the drawing.
Journal of art writing by students, Mar 1, 2018
Curating the Contemporary, 2017
Becoming a Line Examining distributed agency through lines found in drawing, theatrics and novel ... more Becoming a Line Examining distributed agency through lines found in drawing, theatrics and novel writing Anomaline (video: link) Like many other artists, I work in lines. So much so in fact, that my artistic practice 1 seems to revolve around trying eagerly to become a line myself. The line is a bendy concept that seems to lend itself to many a cultural function, from cardiograms, to graceful Da Vinci portraits of saintly faces, to crosscountry road systems, lined paper notebooks and strings on an instrument. "Lend itself": I enjoy this inherent generosity of the line. It volunteers itself readily to bear meanings, to be used, to be deployed in all manner of shapes that matter. It offers itself up to culture to spin itself a cocoon out of intricate threads. As an artist, I spend a lot of time analysing the lines that connect images, music, symbols, cinematic moments, throughout history, wondering why certain marks on a drawing, simple gestures in a dance or specific sequences of words strung together make me feel quite so much, or even seem to impart a sense that I've learned something profound about the world. Artists spanning the draughtsmen of early man in the caves of Lascaux up to French impressionists, 1 to more contemporary ideations of artistic linework I'd like to expand upon, such as choreography, performance and writing.
Curating the Contemporary, May 2, 2016
What could a theatrical script possibly have in common with genomes and artificial intelligence c... more What could a theatrical script possibly have in common with genomes and artificial intelligence computer programs? Prescribing, guiding, dictating and instructing: they belong to the domain of authoritative texts. From their lifeless pages, play scripts determine the configurations of moving, breathing performers. DNA strands contain the symbolic makeup of what and how to make a brand new you, and AI programs instruct the loyal and infallible computer to run a sequence of operations. Yet what makes these scripts peculiar is how they distinguish themselves from other “instructive texts”, such as IKEA manuals, self-help books or cake recipes: they are scripting for something non-designated, unpredictable, self-perpetuating and by all appearances, autonomous.
This article presents a project in performative writing which falls into this proposed category of “blind scripts”, and contemplates agency as a potential product of its open ended design. The text in question, entitled “Rosa + Lawrence Were Here”, is a scripted dialogue between two lovers. Written with the intention of being “run” like programming code, or “expressed” like genes through the iterability of performance, the script cumulatively generates a simulation of autonomy that may provide a useful contrast to originary theories of the human agent.
Curating the Contemporary, Dec 21, 2015
In puzzling over her own role, and the nature of artistic practice herself, Dutch artist Hedwig H... more In puzzling over her own role, and the nature of artistic practice herself, Dutch artist Hedwig Houben opts to at once embody her own practice and obliterate herself as a party in the process. Maintaining a humorous yet fine balance between demonstrative expertise and utter doubt, her work presents itself as an artistic methodology for artistic methodology, and in this finds a means of settling with a fluid notion of what an artist can be: a facilitator, a ventriloquist, a searching scientist on the cusp of knowing.
Emergent technologies present us with ever more modes of being in our world, and challenge a valuation system based on the "real", "original" and "fixed". This article borrows from Hedwig Houben's response to these challenges the notion that being, along with the creative process, is a lot more fluid, continuous and distributed than Western philosophy has historically presumed.
Lectures by Katarina Ranković
Rosa and Lawrence were at Nottingham Contemporary as part of InDialogue, a two day biennial Inter... more Rosa and Lawrence were at Nottingham Contemporary as part of InDialogue, a two day biennial International Symposium that interrogates how artists and researchers use dialogue in practice (2016). Katarina Rankovic follows up this performance of her piece "A Ritual Resuscitation of Eternal Lovers" with a lecture on "blind scripting".
Rosa and Lawrence Were Here is an ongoing communal project in which performances of a single script contribute to a growing archive of instances in which two fictional characters once again find their breath, wear the bodies of kindly readers and discuss how to liberate themselves from their prescriptive predicament.
You are invited to contribute a reading on behalf of the two lovers unborn. Simply download the script upload your reading to the Rosa + Lawrence Archive at http://rosa-and-lawrence.life.
A big thanks to Chris and Jake for donating some consciousness for the cause in December 2016.
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Papers by Katarina Ranković
To use a more familiar analogy, character is to behaviour what climate is to weather, since a climate “attracts” weather to fall into familiar patterns in the space of meteorological possibility. Implied within this theory of character is also a theory of “the human being,” which, by virtue of being capable of performing behaviours in patterned combinations, can be understood as a character substratum, or character-playing machine. Specifically, the human being is versed in playing out the kinds of characters that are commonly recognised as “personality.”
Following this, the thesis posits a second theory: that “the social agent” can be understood as a character (or relatively narrow family of characters) which the human being consistently adopts when it enters the social milieu. Given that the human being is a social animal and spends much time in the social milieu, the social agent and the human being appear, most of the time, to be the same thing. However, the fact that the social agent represents a relatively narrow group of characters within a much vaster character repertoire suggests that the human being is oddly overqualified for society: it is capable of playing out a far greater diversity of characters than it typically does. This attenuation of human character range, or “bureaucratisation of spirit,” may have evolved to enable social collaboration, as evidenced by social practices and aesthetics of authenticity that police human character variability.
This raises questions with potentially far-reaching social and ethical implications in areas such as politics of identity, human rights law and AI alignment efforts: are there any benefits to embracing the character diversity of the human being? Would a greater acceptance of personal diversity endanger, or enrich, social complexity?
Art, a discipline that is characterised by running experiments in social contracts, aesthetics and states of being on its audience, is precisely suited to the task of probing this question. From within the spiritual laboratory of a performance practice in which I am possessed by characters, and by drawing on Daniel Dennett’s evolutionary theory of agency, Erving Goffman’s theatrical framework for self-presentation, Alfred Gell’s theory of art and agency, and Miloš and Slavica Ranković’s work on cultural formulas, the thesis demonstrates that cultivating personal diversity can enhance critical thinking, engender more creative explorations of aesthetic space, and bring new philosophical intuitions to one's everyday experience of selfhood.
thinking thing? It’s far from trivial. Just think of other
instances where shape has turned out to matter. The
shape of an atom spells out its very properties and functions,
and our models of it have had to shift and iterate
over time to accommodate new knowledge about its
behaviours. Before the architecture of neurons and their
galaxy-scale interconnectivity was revealed, the brain
seemed insignificant to a study of mind. The study of
something so elementary as shape even has the potential
to make some of the most hitherto relevant debates
redundant.
For example, people used to ask whether
the Earth was finite or infinite, whether you could travel
in one direction forever, or risked falling off one of its
edges. Although it is hard for us to put ourselves in their
shoes today, this is an entirely commonsensical argument
to have if you assume the world to be flat. The concept
of a round Earth came to be a radical transformation, or
transcendence, of that debate.
It is revealing to observe in so plain an example how a
question can contain within itself a misleading vocabulary
ill-fitted to the phenomenon at hand. This is because it is
a question that prematurely answers itself by way of an
underlying assumption, curtailing access to a more enabling
inquiry. What if something akin to a ‘round Earth’
could be applied to today’s debates about agents, selves, or
thinking things – debates which manifest diversely, from
discussing artificial intelligence, to negotiating politics of
identity? Just like the finite/infinite earth example, the
things people do and say in relation to thinking things
reveals that they already have a certain shape for them in
mind, whether or not they reflect upon it.
It begins by considering philosophy as, not only background context, but an artistic material, that can be pliable and instrumental to an artist. Introducing performative accounts of identity
formation, from Michel Foucault through to Jacques Derrida, I reimagine my own subjectivity as interpellated by a network of sensitive relations, and begin to visualise my agency as ‘disturbances in the causal milieu’ (Gell, 1998). I then argue that these theories of agency are applicable to artworks, or fictional agencies, and not only human subjects. An expanded
concept of the line (in a drawing, a sound, a gesture) is introduced to explore an artwork’s capacity to inhabit and exhibit ‘character’, which is contagious and transferable between agents, whether ‘artificial’ or ‘organic’. From there the paper becomes a platform to consider an experimental art practice, taking a novel I am writing as a proposition for such an art
experiment, where the distinctions between the agencies of real maker and artificial character are blurred and challenged.
This leads me to conclude in asking questions I may previously not have thought askable, such as: to what extent is something as close to home as the human mind, written; inscribed by ancient grooves of genetic memory, articulated by chains of DNA text and ventriloquisedby a culture of stories? And, is it possible to write a person?
My research addresses how art, narrative and fiction might contribute to and extend contemporary studies of subjectivity and self-representation.
This article presents a project in performative writing which falls into this proposed category of “blind scripts”, and contemplates agency as a potential product of its open ended design. The text in question, entitled “Rosa + Lawrence Were Here”, is a scripted dialogue between two lovers. Written with the intention of being “run” like programming code, or “expressed” like genes through the iterability of performance, the script cumulatively generates a simulation of autonomy that may provide a useful contrast to originary theories of the human agent.
Emergent technologies present us with ever more modes of being in our world, and challenge a valuation system based on the "real", "original" and "fixed". This article borrows from Hedwig Houben's response to these challenges the notion that being, along with the creative process, is a lot more fluid, continuous and distributed than Western philosophy has historically presumed.
Lectures by Katarina Ranković
Rosa and Lawrence Were Here is an ongoing communal project in which performances of a single script contribute to a growing archive of instances in which two fictional characters once again find their breath, wear the bodies of kindly readers and discuss how to liberate themselves from their prescriptive predicament.
You are invited to contribute a reading on behalf of the two lovers unborn. Simply download the script upload your reading to the Rosa + Lawrence Archive at http://rosa-and-lawrence.life.
A big thanks to Chris and Jake for donating some consciousness for the cause in December 2016.
To use a more familiar analogy, character is to behaviour what climate is to weather, since a climate “attracts” weather to fall into familiar patterns in the space of meteorological possibility. Implied within this theory of character is also a theory of “the human being,” which, by virtue of being capable of performing behaviours in patterned combinations, can be understood as a character substratum, or character-playing machine. Specifically, the human being is versed in playing out the kinds of characters that are commonly recognised as “personality.”
Following this, the thesis posits a second theory: that “the social agent” can be understood as a character (or relatively narrow family of characters) which the human being consistently adopts when it enters the social milieu. Given that the human being is a social animal and spends much time in the social milieu, the social agent and the human being appear, most of the time, to be the same thing. However, the fact that the social agent represents a relatively narrow group of characters within a much vaster character repertoire suggests that the human being is oddly overqualified for society: it is capable of playing out a far greater diversity of characters than it typically does. This attenuation of human character range, or “bureaucratisation of spirit,” may have evolved to enable social collaboration, as evidenced by social practices and aesthetics of authenticity that police human character variability.
This raises questions with potentially far-reaching social and ethical implications in areas such as politics of identity, human rights law and AI alignment efforts: are there any benefits to embracing the character diversity of the human being? Would a greater acceptance of personal diversity endanger, or enrich, social complexity?
Art, a discipline that is characterised by running experiments in social contracts, aesthetics and states of being on its audience, is precisely suited to the task of probing this question. From within the spiritual laboratory of a performance practice in which I am possessed by characters, and by drawing on Daniel Dennett’s evolutionary theory of agency, Erving Goffman’s theatrical framework for self-presentation, Alfred Gell’s theory of art and agency, and Miloš and Slavica Ranković’s work on cultural formulas, the thesis demonstrates that cultivating personal diversity can enhance critical thinking, engender more creative explorations of aesthetic space, and bring new philosophical intuitions to one's everyday experience of selfhood.
thinking thing? It’s far from trivial. Just think of other
instances where shape has turned out to matter. The
shape of an atom spells out its very properties and functions,
and our models of it have had to shift and iterate
over time to accommodate new knowledge about its
behaviours. Before the architecture of neurons and their
galaxy-scale interconnectivity was revealed, the brain
seemed insignificant to a study of mind. The study of
something so elementary as shape even has the potential
to make some of the most hitherto relevant debates
redundant.
For example, people used to ask whether
the Earth was finite or infinite, whether you could travel
in one direction forever, or risked falling off one of its
edges. Although it is hard for us to put ourselves in their
shoes today, this is an entirely commonsensical argument
to have if you assume the world to be flat. The concept
of a round Earth came to be a radical transformation, or
transcendence, of that debate.
It is revealing to observe in so plain an example how a
question can contain within itself a misleading vocabulary
ill-fitted to the phenomenon at hand. This is because it is
a question that prematurely answers itself by way of an
underlying assumption, curtailing access to a more enabling
inquiry. What if something akin to a ‘round Earth’
could be applied to today’s debates about agents, selves, or
thinking things – debates which manifest diversely, from
discussing artificial intelligence, to negotiating politics of
identity? Just like the finite/infinite earth example, the
things people do and say in relation to thinking things
reveals that they already have a certain shape for them in
mind, whether or not they reflect upon it.
It begins by considering philosophy as, not only background context, but an artistic material, that can be pliable and instrumental to an artist. Introducing performative accounts of identity
formation, from Michel Foucault through to Jacques Derrida, I reimagine my own subjectivity as interpellated by a network of sensitive relations, and begin to visualise my agency as ‘disturbances in the causal milieu’ (Gell, 1998). I then argue that these theories of agency are applicable to artworks, or fictional agencies, and not only human subjects. An expanded
concept of the line (in a drawing, a sound, a gesture) is introduced to explore an artwork’s capacity to inhabit and exhibit ‘character’, which is contagious and transferable between agents, whether ‘artificial’ or ‘organic’. From there the paper becomes a platform to consider an experimental art practice, taking a novel I am writing as a proposition for such an art
experiment, where the distinctions between the agencies of real maker and artificial character are blurred and challenged.
This leads me to conclude in asking questions I may previously not have thought askable, such as: to what extent is something as close to home as the human mind, written; inscribed by ancient grooves of genetic memory, articulated by chains of DNA text and ventriloquisedby a culture of stories? And, is it possible to write a person?
My research addresses how art, narrative and fiction might contribute to and extend contemporary studies of subjectivity and self-representation.
This article presents a project in performative writing which falls into this proposed category of “blind scripts”, and contemplates agency as a potential product of its open ended design. The text in question, entitled “Rosa + Lawrence Were Here”, is a scripted dialogue between two lovers. Written with the intention of being “run” like programming code, or “expressed” like genes through the iterability of performance, the script cumulatively generates a simulation of autonomy that may provide a useful contrast to originary theories of the human agent.
Emergent technologies present us with ever more modes of being in our world, and challenge a valuation system based on the "real", "original" and "fixed". This article borrows from Hedwig Houben's response to these challenges the notion that being, along with the creative process, is a lot more fluid, continuous and distributed than Western philosophy has historically presumed.
Rosa and Lawrence Were Here is an ongoing communal project in which performances of a single script contribute to a growing archive of instances in which two fictional characters once again find their breath, wear the bodies of kindly readers and discuss how to liberate themselves from their prescriptive predicament.
You are invited to contribute a reading on behalf of the two lovers unborn. Simply download the script upload your reading to the Rosa + Lawrence Archive at http://rosa-and-lawrence.life.
A big thanks to Chris and Jake for donating some consciousness for the cause in December 2016.