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René Laloux was a French animator formed at La Borde Clinic alongside Félix Guattari. He collaborated with Roland Topor, Moebius, and Philippe Caza, and made three strange science fiction films across thirty years. From Fantastic Planet and Time Masters to Gandahar, Laloux developed a cinema that refused explanation in favor of suggestion, building worlds that feel vast precisely because they cannot be exhausted by what they show. #worldmaking #substack

From The X-Files and the SCP Foundation to Control, Severance, and Disco Elysium, a distinctive aesthetic has emerged in which case files, redactions, containment procedures, and administrative systems do more than describe strange worlds. They produce them.

This essay introduces the concept of the institutional uncanny to describe the unsettling realization that institutions have become some of the principal operational cosmologies of modern life. Where earlier cultures organized reality through myth and religion, contemporary worlds are increasingly assembled through paperwork, classification, and procedure.

The result is a new kind of fiction in which the file is no longer a record of the world but one of the surfaces on which the world itself is drawn. #worldmaking #substack

What if one of the most distinctive new forms of worldbuilding is not a novel, a game, or a film, but the strategy guide to a game that does not exist?

This essay examines the lore book as an emerging format for worldmaking. Beginning with Vermis I: Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods and Godhusk: Rebirth by Plastiboo, and tracing a lineage through Codex Seraphinianus, House of Leaves, Dinotopia, and the SCP Foundation, it argues that the worlds games produce often exceed the play sessions that provide access to them, and that the lore book is what becomes visible when this excess is presented directly.

At a moment when AI can generate endless fragments, the lore book does the opposite: it holds a world together by hand. The fragment has become cheap. The world remains the harder thing to make.#worldmaking @plastiboo @hollow_press #substack

NASA is currently producing perhaps the most consequential architectural document of the present moment. It is called the Moon to Mars Architecture Definition Document. It is updated annually. It is written in procurement language. It theorizes its own activity in a vocabulary the discipline of architecture does not currently engage with. It is an artifact of unusual rigor, building a planetary inhabitation across two decades through the management of a maintained possibility space. The discipline has so far had almost nothing to say about it. A new essay on the Worldmaking Project Substack reads the documents carefully, traces the methodology of NASA’s “architecting from the right”, and proposes that worldmaking is the position from which this kind of work becomes legible as architecture. It also asks what kind of architect the discipline now needs to be producing. @nasa @nasaartemis #worldmaking #substack

A game about a man who has to rebuild a world from scratch using only the broken instruments of his own perception. A city that hosts a failed revolution, an occupying international order, and a metaphysical entropy in irresolvable tension. A skill system that doesn’t describe what you can do but what kind of animal you are. And for someone who grew up in the post-communist condition the game depicts, a recognition that goes deeper than analysis. New essay on the Worldmaking Project. #discoelysium #worldmaking #substack

A human being stands at the surface of an alien ocean that cannot be understood, only encountered.
What seems like a distant notion is already the condition we inhabit. What if the central question of artificial intelligence is not whether machines think, but what world they inhabit at all?

Reading Stanisław Lem’s Solaris through Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt, this essay reframes intelligence as a problem of worlds rather than capacities.
It introduces the notion of a second-order Umwelt to describe synthetic systems and argues for a new posture in their presence, one that refuses both the fantasy of understanding and the comfort of dismissal.

In 2018, I published an essay at @sciarc SCI-Arc’s Offramp about a strange shift: creative work was becoming content, optimized for circulation rather than meaning. After 8 years, new essay argues that the shift did not end, it became the foundation of the AI era. The same images that once competed for attention are now captured, recombined, and fed back into systems that generate more of the same. The result is a culture of productive unknowing, where opacity is no longer a problem but a feature. If we are operating inside systems we did not design, where does agency remain, and what kind of thinking makes it possible at all?

What is a world? Not everything that exists, but a structure that determines what can exist. Every world is built through selection, and every selection produces a remainder. The question is who is building, what they are excluding, and what will return. New essay on my Worldmaking Project Substack.

Starting with Alberti’s attempt to encode architectural knowledge in transmissible rules, this new essay traces a five-century process in which cognitive work moves progressively from the architect into the system.

What if AI isn’t a disruption arriving from outside the discipline — but the completion of a trajectory architecture set in motion itself? And if that process is now reaching completion, what remains, and where does the intelligence go next?

Link in bio.

I’ve been trying to understand why the concept of the “world model” keeps appearing across domains that don’t usually talk to each other: AI research, cognitive science, game design, the history of civilizations. This Substack essay is my attempt to hold them together, and to ask what it means that the ancient question of what kind of world we inhabit has become, for the first time, partly a design problem.

My latest on the Worldmaking Project Substack:

Starting from Oppenheimer and the grammar of accelerated cinema, the piece explores why the usual response to contemporary attention (“slow looking”) may be misdiagnosing the situation.

What if the cognitive capacities emerging in games, online systems, and networked media are not degraded attention, but a different kind of literacy we haven’t learned to name yet?

The conversation about AI and authorship is asking the wrong question.
Everyone is arguing about who or what stands at the origin of a work. The human as true creator. The AI as tool, or threat, or replacement. Both sides are fighting over the same model of authorship: one where the author stands at the root, in control, generating outward from a position of sovereign intention.
That model was never really true. It just became the official story.
There is an older word for what making actually feels like from the inside. Cybernetics takes its name from the Greek kubernetes: steersman. Not someone standing outside the sea issuing commands. Someone inside it, reading conditions, making continuous adjustments, holding a direction that is real without being rigidly predetermined.
Navigation from the inside out.
My new essay on the Worldmaking Project uses this as the foundation for a different theory of authorship, one that takes the experience of making seriously rather than the legal and romantic fictions built around it.
And uses Hideaki Anno’s production of Neon Genesis Evangelion as the central case study, because what he did under conditions of near-total collapse is one of the most instructive examples of this kind of authorship ever made.
The essay is also a direct provocation to the current AI moment. Not “AI is good” or “AI is bad” but: if you don’t have a formation — a compass built slowly through lived experience, genuine preoccupation, the specific weight of what you’ve suffered and returned to — then what you’re doing with AI isn’t navigation. It’s drift with sophisticated surface features.
Link in bio. Part of a series on worldmaking, alongside recent essays on Elden Ring’s cosmological structure and a deep analysis of Evangelion as a symbolic machine — coming next.