Fabulation is a means of imagining and making futures through the sensory and material qualities of arts. It is a means of world-making that involves doing and inventing, feeling and collaboratively becoming in ways that can both articulate and transform relations between bodies, atmospheres and environments (see Deleuze 1995, Hartman 2008, Haraway 2012, Hickey-Moody 2021a+b, 2024, Coleman 2020). In this workshop, we explore what fabulation might offer to understandings of digital media and affect. We focus on digital media, recognising that we inhabit – in uneven and differentiated ways – sociodigital worlds. We recognise the increasing significance of screens in shaping the feelings and moods of our everyday life and think it is important for qualitative inquiry to develop ways of understanding how digital technologies mediate individual and collective moods. How is our experience changed when digitally recorded? How is a memory mediated when shared on Instagram? What can collective analysis, collaborative digital collagings, discussing our experiences, offer as a strategy of collective politics? 

In this workshop we will practically experiment with digital platforms and sketching, video, photographic and audio apps to capture and present how digital technologies shape moods. This will lead to the collective creation of a series of digital exhibits of themes or 'moods' that weave together our experiences on and offline. The workshop will include some brief excursions to document mood and feeling, some basic editing of what we’ve made, initial collective categorizing of moods, and simple curation, so we can share and collectively discuss our creations. Through thinking and making collectively we (re)imagine the world together: making a connected present opening into a shared future. This practice of digital fabulation is necessarily collective, critical and open. It is a ‘fabulation’ common to the people and to art (Deleuze 1990, 174, 235). We will experiment with this method of fabulation, and our relationality, drawing out its politics, ethics and considering contexts in which it might, and might not, be productive. 

https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/52712/feminist-fabulations-in-algorithmic-empires

Works cited

Coleman, R. (2020) Glitterworlds: The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing. Goldsmiths Press.

Deleuze, G. (1990) Pourparlers, Paris: Minuit. Negotiations 1995, trans. M. Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (2017) Postscript on the Societies of Control. In Surveillance, crime and social control (pp. 35-39). Routledge.

Haraway, D. (2012) SF, Speculative Fabulation and String Figures, Kassel: dOCUMENTA (13).

Hartman, S. (2008) Venus in Two Acts, Small Acts, Number 26, Issue 12, Number 2, pp. 1-14.§

Hickey-Moody, A.C, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., Rousell, D., & Hartley, S. (2021a) Children’s Carbon Cultures. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 21(3), 214-224.

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708621997582

Hickey-Moody, A.C., Horn, C., Willcox, M., & Florence, E. (2021b) Arts-based methods for research with children. Springer Nature.

Hickey-Moody, A.C., & Rousell, D. (2024) Affective Attachments to Carbon within Youth

Cultures. In J. A. B. Morales & S. Zarabadi (Eds.), Towards Posthumanism in

Education (pp. 181-196). Routledge.