About this Episode

An acknowledgment of the many voices, mentors, collaborators, family members—and characters—who shaped this research journey.

This video is the third of three postscripts to Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI.

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

Tara Brabazon's YouTube Channel

About this Episode

This video documents the artistic practice component of the PhD thesis Scripting for Agency, comprising 10 video and audio performance works—including monologues, dialogues, AI voiceovers and a collaborative video essay made with artist Nina Davies. Below you can find links to view each work in full, or a playlist of the entire practice submission.

This video is one of three postscripts to Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI.

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

Artworks

Work 1: Revolutionary (2020)

Work 2: Suburbia (2021)

Work 3: The Man on the Ceiling (2021)

Work 4: The Trickle Traitor Effect (2021)

Work 5: Homo Horizontalis (2021)

Work 6: Coaxing the Lofty Other (2021)

Work 7: Politics of Inner Self (2020)

Work 8: Hospital of Happiness (2019)

Work 9: Fictional Politician (2019)

Work 10: Individual Relic (2021)

Full Playlist of Artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

About this Series

Drawing on the central distinction between character and the human being, this concluding chapter reflects on the human being as a universal character-playing machine—overqualified for society, yet continually reduced to the streamlined “social agent.” We revisit key ideas introduced across the series, including character as a behavioural attractor, frame switching as a creative method and a politics of inner self.

What do we gain by seeing character not as essence but as software—mutable, expressive, and plural? And what are the social and artistic implications of cultivating personal diversity, alongside social diversity? This closing video offers a vocabulary and aesthetic framework for reimagining the self—not as a fixed identity, but as a site of ongoing negotiation between freedom and coherence, diversity and sociality.

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

References

- Dennett, Daniel. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.

- Ranković, Katarina. “Introspective Performance Experiment.” _Scripting for Agency_, 2022. https://katarinarankovic.art/scriptin....

- Ranković, Katarina. “Thought Shift Performance Experiment.” _Scripting for Agency_, 2022. https://katarinarankovic.art/scriptin....

- Ranković, Katarina. "Politics of Inner Self", 2020.

About this Episode

In this final video of Chapter 6, we ask: What is at stake when we mistake the social agent for the human being? Drawing on thought experiments and contemporary discourse on diversity, this episode explores how human character variability is already being managed—socially, politically, aesthetically—and speculates on how that management might be reimagined. If character variability is fundamental to the human being, should personal diversity be protected and cultivated just like social diversity? And what happens when we extend the politics of diversity inward, to the individual self?

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

References

- Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20, no. 20 (1991): 5–32.

- Cloke, Hannah. “Failure of Imagination.” New Scientist, 26 February 2022, 25.

- Dennett, Daniel. Freedom Evolves. Harlow: Penguin, 2004.

- Kaminski, Isabella. “Laws of Nature: Could UK Rivers Be Given the Same Rights as People?” The Guardian, 17 July 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/environme....

- Mediaplanet. “A Mediaplanet Campaign Focused on Diversity in STEM.” New Scientist, 11 December 2021. https://issuu.com/mediaplanetuk/docs/....

- UK Parliament. Human Rights Act 1998. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/....

About this Episode

In this continuation of Chapter 6, we explore Miloš Ranković's concept of vertical disciplining—the process by which complexity at one level is flattened to enable complexity to emerge at another level. Building on the distinction between the human being and the social agent, this episode examines how social complexity is achieved through the attenuation of behavioural diversity, and how the individual is socially conditioned to become a predictable “interface” within a larger communal system. Drawing on holography, Dennett’s intentional stance, and Miloš Ranković’s concept of “the bulk and the conspicuous,” we ask: is the flattening of the human being into the social agent a necessary sacrifice? Or is there a cost to this compression of self?

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

References

- Dennett, Daniel. Freedom Evolves. Harlow: Penguin, 2004.- Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

- Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books, 1990.

- Koestler, Arthur, and John R. Smythies. Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.

- Myers, Frederic. Cited in Marina Warner. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

- Ranković, Miloš. “Frozen Complexity.” In Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research, edited by Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge, 160–64. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.

- Ranković, Miloš. “The Bulk and the Conspicuous: A Turn on Žižek’s Plea.” Unpublished paper (2009). https://www.academia.edu/23519401/The....

- Ranković, Miloš. "‘Something like thinking, that is, intervenes:’ ‘The spectral spiritualisation that is atwork in any tekhnē.’” Unpublished paper, 2011. https://www.academia.edu/5879590/

- Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin, 2007.

About this Episode

In this episode, we unpack the distinction between the social agent—the consistent character we present to others—and the human being: the universal character-playing machine that runs it. The video explores how society encourages character consistency while masking our underlying capacity for behavioural diversity. Drawing on Erving Goffman's phrase—"the bureaucratisation of spirit"—we consider how social roles become fixed, how character predictability facilitates social cooperation and how personal diversity is often sacrificed in favour of social coherence. What do we stand to lose and gain when we accept the habitual conflation of the social agent with the human being?

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

References

- Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London: Routledge, 2011.

- de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. London: Vintage Books, 2011.

- Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990.

- Ranković, Miloš. “Something like thinking, that is, intervenes.” Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/5879590/_Som....

- Santayana, George. Cited in Erving Goffman, _The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life_. London: Penguin, 1990.

- Shakespeare, William. _As You Like It_. Edited by H. J. Oliver. London: Penguin, 2015.

About this Episode

In this introductory video for Chapter 6, The Holographic Human: A Romance of Many Dimensions, we begin a speculative exploration into what it means to be a character-playing human being, beyond the limits of social identity. Drawing inspiration from Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland and holography, this episode lays the groundwork for a deeper distinction between the social agent and the human being. What happens when we mistake a flattened social identity for the full complexity of self? How might a holographic model of the human being invite new ways of understanding character, selfhood, and personal multiplicity?

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

Tallulah Bankhead Performance Sketch

References

- Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. London: Penguin, 1998.

- Thorpe, Jerry. “The Celebrity Next Door.” The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour, Season 1, Episode 2. CBS, 3 December 1957. Image source: https://papermoonloveslucy.tumblr.com...