This website is a manifestation of the current state of the research in the form of an interactive, generative and gamified multimedia archive. This archive strings together speculative texts written specifically for this project, theoretical references by a multitude of authors (list of references coming soon), critical gameplay experiments in the form of videos and time-based artworks produced during the research period of NEST that widens and troubles the context of the research itself.

The texts written for and throughout the research oscillate between complete fiction and factual information. This oscillation is supposed to carry the worldmaking and breaking potentials of para fictional writing and multimedia works.

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NEST aims to use alienation, weirding and modding of machine learning applications to create the basis for the project’s storytelling framework. While the project's main focus is on the effect of machine learning on storytelling and (game)worlds, NEST aims to gather reflections and texts of it’s technological backends - from game interfaces and NPCs to generative machine learning models - that reflect on the mechanics of contemporary applied machine learning development, how this technology is used in various non-art contexts (geopolitics or industrial applications) and how their functionality and black-box mechanics correlate with and augment human perception and psychology.

Through experimental gameplay and storytelling, NEST focuses on the edges of human-machine interaction, berrypicking weird phenomenon and events that string together themselves as parafictional stories and critical reflections, embracing confusion, fantasy, contradiction and imagination to develop an experience based portal to advanced technologies and their impact on reality and society.

The website is still in beta state, expect it to be updated regularly.

NEST is a collaborative project between Tamás Páll, Prof. Margarete Jahrmann, and Thomas Wagensommerer that explores post-anthropocentric experimental game mechanics and play through “XenoLudic” artistic research. The term XenoLudic - coined by Tamás Páll in his ongoing PhD research - refers to a form of artistic research that explores nonhuman subjects, play and agency in games, strategic alienation, critical play and human-machine interaction.

Games are systemic, narrative and cultural representations of reality. They can model systems in controlled environments, they teach us how to interact with worlds and game mechanics are often deployed in non-game contexts, such as marketing or politics. Games often reproduce extractive mechanisms of the Anthropocene, thus their analysis can shed light on the logistics of resource and labor exploitation or the complete domination of nature.

From industrial game development companies to computer hardware manufacturers center artificial intelligence as one of the most important developments of the century, yet the social, psychological and political effects of this technology remain hidden behind marvels it produces and binding non-disclosure agreements. While commercially available applications of artificial intelligence are being developed faster and faster, the marketing narratives they are sold through create mystification that overshadows their repercussions that potentially can generate obscurity, deskilling, and unemployment.

Stemming from the urge to unpack the impact of AI developments and games as interfaces to reality, NEST attempts to pilot a XenoLudic research approach. This approach unpacks how nonhuman intelligence is represented in videogames, how videogame systems enable the development of artificial intelligence and how alienation could be used as a strategy to unveil new ways of human-computer interaction that can unearth multiperspectivity in play.

The XenoLudic methodology includes critical gameplay, weirding and alienation as artistic strategies, open source investigation and experimental game design - an interdisciplinary combination that links performance with computer science, game studies and multimedia art.

The core artistic research questions are:

What can we learn about the apparatus of video games by playing through nonhuman perspectives?
What game mechanics can be formed around strategic alienation and nonhuman interfaces?
How can computational systems and games use alienation and weirding as a post-anthropocentric strategy?

This project is an attempt to use XenoLudic artistic research to compile a critical theoretical framework that can be used as a lens to analyse and augment existing videogame systems and to unpack systems of domination and exploitation ingrained in games and the development of artificial intelligence.