Richard A Carter
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Agentia is a work of navigable poetry, examining the unfolding of the world through the encounters of animals, plants, and even stones.
Each entity featured in Agentia experiences, senses, or simply witnesses in ways very different to that of the human mind and body. Rather than suggest their being in the world can be expressed directly through language, Agentia (Medieval Latin for agency, ability, to act, perform, broadly construed) uses found language excerpted from related works of literature, creating a collage of registers (often strange and enigmatic), that can hint at such more-than-human stories - including, inevitably, their entangled relations with our own.
Agentia adopts a minimalist approach to storytelling. When incarnated as an animal, you can wander the landscape freely, seeking out interesting features, and perhaps diving further into their perceptual, conceptual, or cultural associations. At times, additional stories can surface from the very act of journeying, or even standing still. Ambient sound is used to complete the scene, and is best experienced using headphones.
As an animal, you can use either the arrow or WASD keys to move.
Plants and stones, of course, do not move through the world in the same way. You are invited to be still with them, reading vignettes from time and space as they flow by, and so consider a distinctly non-human mode of being.
The piece concludes after a certain number of stories are told, after which you will be reincarnated. You are gently encouraged to explore slowly and resist excavating every possibility - there are no goals to reach, and no rewards other than the texts yielded.
If you wish to reincarnate as another being (and another landscape) from the one you started with, press the R key. Press the C key for credits and M key for materials used. Return to this page by pressing the I key.
Agentia was composed using a generative cut-up technique, algorithmically extracting short phrases from a range of non-fiction texts, mostly vintage and sourced from Gutenberg.org and Archive.org, and then arranging these together manually. Some texts also provided additional visual material for the Agentia tileset. Each scene uses materials that explore, invoke, or resonate with the plant, animal, or object being depicted, but these are nevertheless left unspecified. The unordered list below is thus included only for those interested.
Concept, coding, and composition by Richard A Carter
Hand drawn isometric tileset courtesy of Withering Systems
Source materials courtesy of Gutenberg.org and Archive.org, or author's own
Musical theme is Solemn Solstice by George Georgia, courtesy of Audio Network
Sound effects courtesy of Soundsnap and Freesound
Typeset in IM Fell by Igino Marini
With the exception of any indicated materials not by the author, this work is being published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
Richard A Carter is an academic in Digital Culture at the University of York. Carter's research practice investigates the more-than-human dimensions of technical artefacts, activities, and environments.
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