About this Episode
Can something scripted ever be truly free? In this episode, we explore the philosophical tension between determinism and autonomy by asking what it really means to act freely within a system governed by rules. Drawing on Daniel Dennett’s compatibilism, cellular automata like John Conway’s Game of Life and the aesthetics of glitch, we examine whether agency can emerge from scripts—biological, computational, or cultural.
Along the way, we challenge common assumptions about spontaneity, control, skill, and error, and reflect on whether scripting might be not a limitation of agency, but its very condition. For artists, coders, and thinkers alike, this is an invitation to reimagine agency beyond the binary of prescription versus autonomy.
This is the second 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
Play the Game of Life: https://playgameoflife.com
References
- Ainslie, George. Breakdown of Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.” Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 168–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014....
- Collins, Joan. “Joan Collins – Unscripted.” Royal & Derngate. YouTube video. Uploaded August 10, 2016.
- Dennett, Daniel. Freedom Evolves. Harlow: Penguin, 2004.
- Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
- Rankovic, Katarina. “Unborn Lovers: Scripting for Agency.” Curating the Contemporary, May 2, 2016. https://curatingthecontemporary.org/2....
- Ranković, Miloš. “Theory and Practice of Handmade Distributed Representation.” PhD diss., The University of Leeds, 2007. https://www.academia.edu/1458773/Theory_and_Practice_
of_Handmade_Distributed_Representation.
- Rippon, Gina. “How neuroscience is exploding the myth of male and female brains.” New Scientist, February 28, 2019. https://www.newscientist.com/article/....
- Wolfram, Stephen. A New Kind of Science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, 2002.