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 and blind spots that even supposedly neutral character frames can carry. Performance, art, authorship and critique intersect here in a candid analysis of the forces shaping knowledge production.

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

- Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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

- Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

- Ranković, Katarina. “The Shape of a Thinking Thing.” In Goldsmiths PhD Art Publication, edited by Marie-Alix Isdahl, Dani Smith and Nina Wakeford. Independently published in an edition of 500, 2021.

- Samanani, Farhan. How to Live with Each Other: An Anthropologist’s Notes on Sharing a Divided World. London: Profile Books, 2022.

- Wolfram, Stephen. A New Kind of Science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, 2002.

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 inner diversity—and what happens when one character dares to speak back.

Through an experimental letter written by a rarely-expressed character to her more dominant counterpart, we witness a confrontation with the very politics of selfhood. What does it mean for a character to be tethered to social expectations, while others are allowed to emerge freely, if briefly, in artistic space?

This episode is a continuation of Chapter 5: Classes of Character and a Politics of Inner Self from the Scripting for Agency series.

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

- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. J. W. Burrow (London: Penguin, 1985).

- Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Vintage, 2011).

- David L. Stern, “The Genetic Causes of Convergent Evolution,” Nature Reviews Genetics 14 (2013): 751–64. doi:10.1038/nrg3483.

- Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh, “The Coloniality of Planting: Legacies of Racism and Slavery in the Practice of Botany,” _The Architectural Review_, 27 January 2021. https://www.architectural-review.com/....

- Chief Seattle, “Chief Seattle’s Speech,” Suquamish Tribe website. https://suquamish.nsn.us/home/about-u....

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 scarcity and the ethics of inner multiplicity. Can multiple selves coexist equitably? And what does it mean to manage the soul-space of the self?

In this video, theory, performance and philosophy converge in an improvised seance of identity and agency. While this section describes the performance experiment, Section 5.1b will discuss its implications.

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-seriesPhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

Politics of Inner Self

References

- Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

- Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. London: Penguin, 1990.

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 experiment that first revealed the unequal status of characters in Katarina's own practice, and use this to propose a new framework: a politics of inner self. This theory offers a way to think critically about identity, authorship, and the internal distribution of agency. Who gets to speak? Who gets silenced? And which character gets to even think up this thesis?

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, Samuel. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Edited by Henry Festing Jones. London: A. C. Fifield, 1912.

- Shafak, Elif. Black Milk: On Motherhood and Writing. London: Penguin, 2013.

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

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 unknown—treating character not as something projected, but as something conjured.

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

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 selfhood emerge, shift, and even change completely—raising questions about identity, transformation, and the limits of what can be thought from within given characters.

This is the third of four episodes in Chapter 4 of the thesis, Scripting for Agency, setting the stage for a deeper understanding of how characters emerge, shift, and are socially regulated.

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

Thought Shift Performance Experiment

References

- Hong, Ying-Yi, et al. “Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition.” American Psychologist 55, no. 7 (2000): 709–20.

- John Lewis. “Roots of Ensemble Forecasting.” Monthly Weather Review 133, no. 7 (2005): 1865–87. https://doi.org/10.1175/MWR2949.1.

- Pirandello, Luigi. One, No One and One Hundred Thousand. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Marsilio, 1990.

- Ranković, Miloš. “Meteoric Theory of Art.” Lecture. London: 2014.

- Ranković, Katarina. “Thought Shift Performance Experiment.” 2022.

- Schumacher, Joel, dir. Falling Down. United States: Warner Bros., 1993.

- Nichols, Mike, dir. Regarding Henry. United States: Paramount Pictures, 1991.