Enacting Alienographies: Speculative Fiction as Method for Spatial Writing
Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
This workshop explores the productive friction between embodied spatial experience and technologically mediated perception within the field of language-based artistic research. We propose a performative transposition of Thomas Ballhausen’s 12-part speculative fiction text “What the Probes Report,” (structured along the fictional experiences of 12 existing space probes) transforming it into an embodied spatial exploration in which participants temporarily inhabit the constrained yet hyperattentive agency, selecting one of the space probes. Our practice positions text not merely as a discursive medium but as a material assemblage emerging through embodied, performative, and spatial operations. By transposing Ballhausen’s text through the computational agency of a large language model, we generated a performance score that suspends conventional human modes of spatial perception. The score activates what we call an “operator”—a designed agency with distinct cognitive capacities that diverge from human consciousness. Participants enact one of 12 space probes, each offering specific sensorial limitations and technological affordances that reshape human spatial attention and articulation. The workshop directly addresses the conference theme by exploring suspension as both epistemic metaphor and artistic operation. Participants experience a double suspension: first, of their familiar embodied perspectives, replaced by the constrained but heightened perceptual modes of technological operators; second, of language itself, as they navigate the gap between non-verbal spatial experience and its subsequent documentation, where the non-human enactment also opens to non-verbal modes of articulation. Methodologically, the workshop demonstrates transposition as a generative operation—one that maintains connection to the source material while producing a new context through technological and agential reconfigurations. By shifting a literary text across media, embodiment, and species boundaries, we investigate how meaning emerges not from representation but from differential relationships between positions. The workshop unfolds in three parts over one hour: 15’ practice introduction and workshop instructions, 30’ embodied exploration facilitated by the performance score and documented in booklets specifically designed for the workshop, and 15’ collective sharing.