About this Episode
In this episode, we consider how both human beings and fictional characters are shaped by forces of inheritance and leave behind legacies. Through a reflection on Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and an original performance piece (A Ritual Resuscitation of Eternal Lovers), this video explores how character is not born from essence but emerges from scripts—cultural, literary, and behavioural. What does it mean to be haunted by characters we could have been? Can fictional agents be said to live? And what do we share, ontologically, with the ghosts of literature?This is the first of four episodes in Chapter 3 of the thesis, Scripting for Agency, exploring the question: can a self be written—or, "encoded and decoded"?
About this Series
Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.Links
Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-series
PhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf
Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art
A Ritual Resuscitation of Eternal Lovers: https://rosaandlawrence.art, performed also at The Cockpit Theatre and South London Gallery as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021.
References
- Bo Burnham. Inside. Released 30 May 2021. Netflix.
- Brewer, David A. The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
- Frow, John. Character and Person. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.
- Palmer, Alan. “Storyworlds and Groups.” In Social Minds in the Novel, 183–202. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010.
- Ricœur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.