Agentia is a work of navigable poetry, examining the unfolding of the world through the encounters of animals, plants, and even stones. It is part walking-simulator, part-hypertext.

Each entity featured in Agentia experiences, senses, or simply witnesses the world in ways very different to that of the human mind and body. Rather than suggest their being can be expressed directly through language, Agentia (Medieval Latin for agency, ability, to act, perform, broadly construed) uses found language excerpted from related works of literature, creating a collage of registers (often strange and enigmatic), that can hint at such more-than-human stories – including, inevitably, their entangled relations with our own. This particular use of found language is deliberate, as the author is wary about the notion of “giving voice” to agencies other than us. They already have a voice, just across different registers (and that we often ignore or dismiss), and our sense of them is always mediated.

Concentrated around a series of landscapes and figures, Agentia is a celebration of all the different stories and modes of agency that makes up the more-than-human world – to acknowledge the richness and wonder to be found when meditating on the nature of all living and non-living beings, both past and present, and to encourage a perspective on the planet that acknowledges the highly complex interconnections that enable all Earthly life and activity.

The specific process of making Agentia involved algorithmically extracting short phrases from a range of (mainly) vintage titles and arranging these manually into an interlinked body of words. Each scene uses texts that explore, invoke, or resonate with the plant, animal, or object being depicted.

This piece requires a keyboard and mouse to navigate, and is also best enjoyed using headphones. Please note it is designed for use with a conventional widescreen display, and is currently not compatible with mobile or tablet displays below a certain size – this may change in the future.