Alice Bucknell is an LA-based artist, writer, and educator with a particular interest in game engines and speculative fiction. Their recent work has focused on exploring the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge.

Bucknell is generally interested in the limits of scientific understanding and systems thinking, the weird possibilities of play, and the ecological dimensions of games that can dissolve binaries like humans vs environment, natural vs synthetic intelligence, and self vs world.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
An extended cut of the artist’s cinematic universe, The Alluvials, BE CANINE DO CRIME adopts the nonhuman POV of a pack of wolves. In this woozy and fugue state of embodiment, the viewer becomes attuned to another way of sensing the world; canine comms in signs and sigils create a rift or portal for collective liberation and the flaming end of hegemonic state-sponsored violence machines.

The video riffs on various doggish post-human thinking including Keller Easterling’s canine mind and Donna Haraway’s companion species manifesto. It also embraces the glitches and failures of modelling technologies embedded in the game engine as an anarchic ecology. Building on the open-ended, deracinated concept of time in CIRCA’s 2024 manifesto, the film advocates for a point where human-centric logic and language structures get checked at the door and something more feral takes over.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
A whole video game flooded with altered ecological states, senses of perspective, nonhuman temporalities and ways of knowing the world. I’d develop a planet-sensing video game that uses real-time environmental data and climate forecasting to spawn a unique world each time it’s played. Something like an ecological tamagotchi, its resolution would slowly degrade throughout gameplay; players must make the choice between archiving the world or experiencing it affectively as it corrodes.

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