“Of the exhibition’s artworks, Beatrice Glow’s mock-luxe multimedia installation Smoke Trails (2021) creates the most developed world. Set in the year 2068, the project imagines the fictional estate sale of a quadrillionaire family, nicknamed the “Empire of Smoke,” that made its fortune in the tobacco and arms industries. The ornate, faux-porcelain and -gold objects — from pipes to rifles, to vape pens — have been 3D printed and displayed on a gallery wall, and are also displayed in a VR-generated video tour of the dynastic family’s mansion. But Smoke Trails achieves its most complete expression in the published “mocktion” catalogue, “The Collection of the EoS10^15” (2021), produced by Glow and Jeong-A Kim.

The 100-page-long auction catalogue stands out not only because the form lends itself well to satire (for example, a vape pen prototype is extolled for its rarity in the year 2068) but also because books provide ample room for what fiction writers and game designers call worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is particularly important for genres such as sci-fi and fantasy, in which the fictional universe differs substantially from the actual one, but, whatever the genre, elements such as character, folklore, and setting provide the story with coherence and depth. Broadly speaking, there are two types of worldbuilding design: top-down, which begins with a thorough, big picture schema and fills in details from there; and bottom-up, which begins with relevant details and only sketches out the big picture as needed.”