Scripting for Agency
Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a lecture series based on 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. New episodes every Sunday and Thursday until 14.12.25. YouTube series: https://bit.ly/sfa-series Thesis PDF: https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf Thesis art: https://bit.ly/sfa-art
Episodes
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 o...
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 ...
About this Episode
Originally conceived as the prologue to the thesis, this epilogue reflects on the early, uncertain moments of adopting a “research character.” We follow the narrator’s hesitant steps into academic voice, exploring the role of genre, institutional architecture, literary influence and inherited voices in shaping the self that writes. Touching on Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf and Erik Satie, this personal meditation be...
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.
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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 bein...
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 soci...
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 ...
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 w...
About this Episode
What does it mean to do research “in character”? In this concluding episode of Chapter 5, we explore how different internal personas—like the academic, the runner, the cynic, or the dreamer—might shape the kind of knowledge we produce. Extending the well-known concept of research positionality beyond the social agent, this video asks: what if the diversity of self within a single human being could enrich academic ...
About this Episode
This episode explores how the character adopted during a process of research or writing unconsciously influences the kind of knowledge that that process can produce. The video asks: Who is really doing the writing in academic contexts? And how does the character of scholarly rigour sometimes produce unintended outcomes?
This chapter continues the exploration of a “politics of inner self,” highlighting the momentum ...
About this Episode
In this video, we explore the classification of character types through the lens of performative research, culminating in a new distinction: tethered versus tangential characters. How do different characters within us get assigned power, expression time, or even social legitimacy? From early taxonomies like “fictional vs real” to “dominant vs subordinate,” this episode investigates how we unconsciously manage our ...
About this Episode
In this video, the second half of a dialogic performance experiment unfolds as two distinct characters—both played by the same person—reflect on what it means to share a single consciousness. We explore comparisons to chair work therapy, internal dialogues, dissociative identity and performance art to deepen the notion of a “politics of inner self.” What does it mean when one version of you dominates the stage of ...
About this Episode
In this first episode of Chapter 5 in Scripting for Agency, we dive into a performance experiment that stages an internal dialogue between two distinct characters—both played by the artist. What begins as a performance exercise quickly reveals a power dynamic between dominant and subordinate aspects of the self. Through this improvised conversation, the video explores questions of character hierarchy, expressive s...
About this Episode
In this opening to Chapter 5, we explore Elif Shafak’s “choir of discordant voices” as a model for understanding the self—not as a unified whole, but as a dynamic society of competing characters. Drawing on Shafak’s metaphor of inner governance, this episode introduces the idea that not all characters within us are equal, and that their interplay reflects social and cultural hierarchies.
We begin with a performance...
About this Episode
In this final video of Chapter 4, we explore the role of curiosity as the central force behind character performance as a method of discovery. Drawing on analogies of spiritual mediumship, we contrast traditional acting with a performance practice that suspends control in favour of soul-searching and character attunement. This episode asks how authentic character expression can emerge when we hold space for the un...
About this Episode
What if our personality isn’t composed of a set of fixed traits, but is more like a weather system—dynamic, patterned, and ever-evolving? In this video, we move from thinking of character as a frame to imagining it as a climate: a behavioural attractor that governs the shape of our thoughts and actions over time. Drawing analogies from meteorology and dynamical systems theory, this episode explores how patterns of...
About this Episode
What happens when we shift the way we act, speak, or even think depending on who we’re with? In this video, we explore frame switching—a psychological and social phenomenon where individuals adopt different “selves” across cultural and social contexts. Drawing on research from cultural psychology, sociology, and performance studies, this episode examines how authenticity, consistency, and social expectation shape ...
About this Episode
In this episode, we delve into the idea of character as a frame, drawing from cultural psychology, linguistics, and personal narrative. Exploring the phenomenon of frame switching—how individuals seamlessly shift between social personas depending on cultural context—this video challenges essentialist views of identity. We discuss concepts like code-switching, cultural priming, and contextual personality, unpacking...
About this Episode
In this opening video for Chapter 4 of Scripting for Agency, we delve into the evolving concept of character—moving beyond the idea of character as software into more dynamic models drawn from cultural psychology and meteorology.
Building on earlier discussions of character as a transmissible pattern, this episode introduces the idea of character as both frame and climate. Drawing on tools like phase portraits and ...
About this Episode
Can a script produce an agent?
In this closing to Chapter 3: Code and Expression, we explore how scripting—understood as the dual mechanism of code and expression—may contribute to the emergence of agency. From genetic and computational systems to artistic and performative contexts, this video traces how scripts operate across different material substrates to generate autonomous-seeming behaviour. We revisit concep...
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