A screenshot from Gondwana featuring a 3D-rendered rainforest scene. Trees and ferns line the sides of the image with a river running through the center.

27 Sep WORLDING is here! + Special Presentation, Keynote announced

Posted at 11:00h in News by

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 27 – The inaugural WORLDING workshop is here! Co-Creation Studio at MIT ODL in collaboration with Unity is thrilled to announce that the 5 teams selected for WORLDING are convening online. They will research and incubate projects at the intersection of land-use planning, documentary, 3D virtual worlds and climate futurism.

As part of the convening, WORLDING organizers have revealed a surprise Special Presentation: the award-winning durational VR event GONDWANA will unfold online over the course of the next 7 days for the selected teams to encounter virtually. GONDWANA is a constantly-evolving virtual ecosystem chronicling the possible futures of the world’s oldest tropical rainforest, the Daintree. Powered by 100 years of climate data, each showing is unrepeatable and speculative, a meditation on time, change, and loss in an irreplaceable landscape.

A screenshot from Gondwana featuring a 3D-rendered rainforest scene. Trees and ferns line the sides of the image with a river running through the center.

GONDWANA

“We are honoured to explore Gondwana, stretching the story and its impact over the course of our week together, as a remarkable artistic backdrop to our conversations, while we research and incubate new projects that also explore space, story, 3D virtual worlds and the urgency of climate futurism,” said Katerina Cizek, artistic director of Co-Creation Studio.

It’s the first time the GONDWANA co-creators are running the experience for 7 days, as previous exhibitions have unfolded over 24 or 48 hours. The WORLDING team will meet GONDWANA creators Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts to discuss the real-world resonances of their virtual storyworld. The public is welcome to watch the GONDWANA livestream for free here until Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2022.

Dawn, a white woman with dark & grey hair pinned back, is outside on a bright day. She smiles slightly, looking to her left and away from the camera. She wears silver earrings, a white open-collared button-down shirt, and a canvas jacket. Her headshot is embedded in a larger image of a dark green pointelized 3D model of a forest, with the words reWORLDING on it

KEYNOTE ANNOUNCED

The WORLDING workshop will culminate in a livestream keynote by Dawn Danby, as part of the Open Documentary Lab Public Talk Series. Danby’s talk is called Living Infrastructures: Reworlding Urban Environments. Danby’s studio, Spherical, is currently working on developing mapping, storytelling, and visualisation tools to enhance the ability of communities to heal urban watersheds in California. After the talk, she will be joined by the WORLDING teams to discuss the connections between story, space, climate, and game-engine technologies.

“Dawn’s work is incredibly exciting” said Marina Psaros, Unity’s head of sustainability. “I can’t imagine a more inspiring way to close out the Worlding session than by engaging with Dawn’s perspectives on technology and Earth systems integrity.”

Registration for the keynote is free and open to the public here.

The teams will meet with total 46 advisors, speakers, mentors and other worldbuilding teams from around the world. The full list of advisors is now available here.

More videos and a report on WORLDING will be published later in 2022.

A photo gallery of ten experts who will advise for the WORLDING workshop

There are a total of 46 Advisors for WORLDING.

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WORLDING is a first-of-its-kind research and development initiative that explores climate futures at the intersection of documentary, land-use planning, speculative modeling and game-engine technologies. It’s a partnership between Unity Software / the Unity Charitable Fund and the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab.