Hi! I'm Kit, and I work with sci-fi and speculative fiction as a technologist, teacher, and writer. I use the term SF widely, through in my view one essential aspect of SF is some degree of worldbuilding, and commitment to the world that has been built - even if it is not explained, or explained through a confused or limited character.

As Samuel R. Delany writes: "You can put together more interesting combinations of words in science fiction than you can in any other kind of writing—and they actually mean something. You can say things like, 'The door dilated' ... and it implies both design and technology, as well as whole sets of social and experiential differences . When you say things like, “Her world exploded,” [you] reserve the margin for the words to mean that a planet belonging to a woman blew up."

It is such poetics of the literal that most draw me to SF, in literature and games alike, as well as in crafting performances with machine collaborators.

Algorithmic Poetry of Fictional Robotics (March 26 - April 23, 2024) @ School of Machines, Making, and Make-Believe, Berlin. How have historical developments in robotics, speculative fiction, and algorithmic poetry influenced our understanding of the present and the future?

In collaboration with Mario Guzman, I teach speculative fiction at Berlin's School of Machines, Making, and Make-Believe since 2023. I also previously taught a course on worldbuilding in SF more generally.

Ongoing collaboration with Samantha Tiussi, in which we explore collaborative performance with glass creatures through partial automation.

Together with Sage Jenson, who developed the interactive simulation based on the slime mold Physarum Polycephalum, I performed and exhibited visual art in Dismantling (2019) @ Workshop on Forster, Berlin.

(Top) Nonlinear behaviour of the system allows a diversity of structures to arise from the same underlying simulation mechanics and parameterization. (Bottom) Two frames showing how the scribe’s input deliberately induces an accumulation of energy, which then flows in ways the scribe has no direct control over. This performance, and our approach to choreography with a complex speculative system, is described in our paper below:

Jenson, Sage, & Kuksenok, Kit (2020). How to Observe the Inner Space of a Complex Biological System through Speculative Simulation. Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 12(3), 9-24. 10.34632/jsta.2020.9489.

We also contributed an invited chapter in the Future of Text edited volume (download here), "Biological Ink: Extending The Scribe Through Digital Simulation":

"...digital ink materiality has no counterpart in the realm of physical ink materiality. Digital ink allows the scribe to intentionally shift agency between themselves and the simulation; and to engage with the simulated system agency at a level of complexity and scale inaccessible in a physical handwriting medium." (Jenson & Kuksenok, 2020)

Dwell (2023) is a short collaborative storytelling game, where the end of the story is already known, but the way there must be decided through turn-based gameplay.