Scripting for Agency

About this Episode In this episode, we explore the distributed self—a model of personhood that challenges the idea of the self as a centralised essence contained within the body. Drawing on thinkers such as Daniel Dennett, Marilyn Strathern, and Virginia Woolf, the video proposes that the self may instead be constituted across objects, others, places, and time. We follow Virginia Woolf's prota...

About this Episode In this episode, we explore one of the most persistent intuitive models of the self: the vessel. Drawing on anthropology and neuroscience, the video examines why the idea of a soul or self as something “contained within” the body remains so widespread—and what problems this shape creates when trying to understand agency. We encounter the “homunculus effect,” investigate infinite...

About this Episode In this introductory video to Chapter 2 of Scripting for Agency, we explore the question: What is the shape of a thinking thing? Drawing comparisons to scientific models, such as have existed for atoms or the Earth, this episode highlights how intuitive diagrams and conceptual “shapes” influence the way we think about selves, agents, and identity. Through historical examples, co...

About this Episode In this final section of Chapter 1, we delve into the uncanny act of prolonged mirror gazing as a method of self-estrangement. What begins as a reassuring glance becomes a disquieting encounter—where the self, once assumed stable, starts to unravel into something indeterminate. Drawing from personal performance practice, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, and phenomenology, this...

About this Episode In this episode, we explore how agency, authorship, and creativity have long been imagined in spatial terms—from ancient poets and muses to modern artists like Cézanne and Cindy Sherman. Drawing on philosophical, anthropological, and artistic accounts, this chapter unpacks the surprisingly persistent idea that the self must be "emptied" before it can be filled. Is agen...

About this Episode What happens when the artist steps aside and lets something—or someone—else speak through them? In this video, we continue exploring the metaphor of the artist as a medium—someone who becomes a channel for external agency, impression, or character. Drawing on examples from Cézanne’s rhythmic brushwork, T.S. Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry and Cindy Sherman’s photographic sel...

About this Episode In this episode, we explore the metaphor of the artist as a medium: a channel for other voices, forces, and intentions. Drawing from historical, spiritual, and artistic lineages, the video asks what it means to make space for otherness in art, and how we might conceptualise agency. Does creativity come from within—or through us? And how does this affect our understanding of auth...

About this Episode In this episode, we explore the idea of character as a contagious system of memes—cultural patterns that spread and evolve like genes. Building on the concept of jealousy introduced earlier, this video investigates how our identities are shaped by memetic inheritance, and how imitation, expression, and transmission make us part of a shared cultural lineage. Drawing from Dawkins,...

About this Episode This episode introduces jealousy as a central emotional mechanism in the development of character within an artistic performance practice. Drawing on childhood encounters with powerful fictional figures like Disney’s Mulan , the artist explores how admiration can become a catalyst for transformation, imitation, and aesthetic experimentation. Unlike desire or envy, the jealousy d...

About this Episode This episode deepens the exploration of self-estrangement by analysing what happens before, during, and after a performance of character. Through a critical reflection on her own video tutorial, Katarina questions the distinction between “real” and “performed” identity, exploring how genre conventions and expressive habits shape even our most habitual selves. Drawing on Erving G...

About this Episode As part of a collaborative research project at Exposed Arts (Intelligence Debiased, 2020), the artist-researchers will be swapping methodologies from their practices to explore an expanded notion of intelligence, beyond anthropocentric perspectives. This is a follow-up tutorial to a previous part, "Self-Estrangement as Method - Tutorial 1'", in which I shared one of my performan...

About this Episode This method, derived from my art practice, involves recognising the malleability of personhood and using performance to newfangle the self and make room for new kinds of thoughts to emerge. When I use this practice to temporarily behave in a slightly altered way, it seems to shift the landscape of my mind and allows me to have thoughts that seem to have been previously inaccessi...

About this Episode This episode introduces "self-estrangement" as a performance-based research method. The practice involves deliberately altering one’s habitual identity in order to inhabit alternative characters and perspectives. Viewers are introduced to a two-part tutorial that demonstrates how to induce self-estrangement and explore the self as a flexible, embodied structure. The method is pr...

About this Episode This episode introduces the self-estrangement performance practice at the heart of the research. Developed over a decade, this method involves deliberately unsettling one’s habitual identity in order to explore and inhabit alternative characters. By manipulating subtle physical and vocal behaviours, the artist becomes other—and in doing so, questions what the self is and how it...

About this Episode This episode summarises the key findings of the research project. It introduces two central insights: first, that character functions like a cognitive attractor—it is the shape of what is thinkable to a person for the time it is adopted; and second, that the social agent (the character we perform in society) is not the same as the human being (the character-playing machine). By...

About this Episode This episode introduces the research methodology at the heart of Scripting for Agency . Combining performance practice, critical self-reflection, and a mechanistic approach to concepts like self, character, and agency, it outlines how experimental role-play and artistic improvisation can function as a “laboratory of the soul.” The video explores how language, repetition, pattern...

About this Episode This episode offers a cross-disciplinary overview of the major thinkers and traditions that shape contemporary ideas about selfhood, identity, and agency. From Judith Butler and Paul Ricoeur to Daniel Dennett and cultural psychology, it traces how the self has been theorised as fluid, scripted, contextual, and computational. The video also contrasts how academic and artistic pra...

About this Episode This episode explores why the question of selfhood has become urgent in the context of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence and deepening political divisions. It examines how our implicit assumptions about what a self is—particularly the belief that true agency must be spontaneous and unscripted—can reinforce rigid, essentialist identities. These assumptions shape how we na...

About this Episode What does it really mean to bring a fictional character to life—and what does this reveal about what makes a “real” person? In this opening episode, artist and researcher Katarina Ranković introduces the original motivation behind her thesis: a quest to free her characters from authorship and grant them autonomy. But this creative problem quickly spirals into deeper questions ab...

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...