![[ URL : IRL ] Science Fiction Prototyping — Artifice x Quest](hero.png)
Ideas Panel — FWB Fest 2026
Quest x Artifice
60 minutes. 6 speakers. Guest Editor: OPEN.
Quest
"IF EVERYONE IS BUILDING THEIR OWN REALITY NOW, WHY CAN'T I?"
— ROSS GENDELS
Ross Gendels was riding the subway home from Base Design, reading through another wave of news that felt less like journalism and more like someone else's worldbuilding. Politicians, oligarchs, and celebrities constructing realities at scale — and everyone else living inside them without being asked. He started Quest to build back.
Quest is a speculative fiction publication — reader-funded, no ads, no sponsors — that uses sci-fi and fantasy as instruments for examining the systems shaping our lives. Five hundred writers from around the world submitted to its first issue. The theme was "Thresholds" — fiction written at the crossing point between one condition and the next. Technology outpacing social adaptation. Rising authoritarianism. Environmental collapse treated as weather.
"Good speculative fiction is world-building," Ross says. "Constructing systems, cultures, rules and experiences that feel coherent and alive. I think about brands the same way." The distance between designing a fictional world and designing a brand environment is shorter than it appears. Both are constructed realities. Both have internal logic. Both shape how people feel when they're inside them.
Artifice
Artifice is a creative studio in New York that shapes and links artifacts — objects, environments, and experiences produced through speculative practice. The name is literal: the studio's work begins where science fiction leaves the page.
Over five years, across events at the Processing Foundation, ONX Studio in Tribeca, and Anasis Onyx in Tribeca, Artifice has developed a method for translating speculative concepts into physical encounters. The studio calls these worldsites — designed environments where the digital and physical are continuous, where a URL and a room are two states of the same surface.
The method operates through two conditions. Lab (WHITEBOX) is research made visible — process exposed, decisions readable, construction legible. Stage (BLACKBOX) is experience made immersive — construction receded, the visitor inside the system rather than observing it. Same artifact, two modes of encounter. At nodes:i, that looked like koji fermenting in a lab room upstairs and a body-controlled navigation system in a blacked-out room downstairs. The artifact was the same research — what changed was what the visitor was allowed to know about how it was made.
The Collaboration
QUEST
Quest publishes constructed worlds — each story an environment with its own physics, its own social architecture, its own failure modes. The reader inhabits it before the world does. Ross wants to expand into music, video, creative nonfiction — new materials for the same practice of using speculative fiction to examine complex ideas in unexpected ways.
ARTIFICE
Artifice translates speculative concepts into physical encounters — giving a fiction its texture, its material, its temperature. The concept leaves the page and enters a room where a visitor can walk through it, touch it, feel where the construction is visible and where it recedes. The artifact of science fiction becomes an artifact you can stand inside.
Ross described Quest as a sandbox for bringing together art, design, sci-fi, politics, culture. This panel is the first time that sandbox gets a physical address — Quest's fiction meeting Artifice's space, with six practitioners mapping what happens at the seam between a world you read and a world you walk through.
Speakers — Quest
QUEST
ROSS GENDELS
Founder, Quest
Associate Creative Director, Base Design
Brooklyn, NY
Founded Quest — a reader-funded speculative fiction publication using sci-fi and fantasy as analytical tools to examine politics, culture, and society. 500+ global submissions for Issue 01. No ads, no sponsors. Teaches at Pratt and The New School. Commercial practice at Base spans Studio Museum in Harlem, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, eBay.
Panel role: Co-moderator. Fiction as worldbuilding practice.
QUEST — GUEST
JULIAN BLEECKER
Founder, Near Future Laboratory
Los Angeles / Geneva
Originated the practice of design fiction with Bruce Sterling. His concept of the diegetic prototype — a technology that exists first inside a fiction — is the theoretical foundation of the panel. Created the TBD Catalog. PhD, USC.
Panel role: The methodology. Fiction as computation, not prediction.
QUEST — GUEST
K ALLADO-McDOWELL
Writer / Artist / Musician
Faculty, SCI-Arc / Long Now Foundation
Los Angeles
Wrote Pharmako-AI — the first book co-authored with GPT-3. Three books with LLMs. Uses musical improvisation as a framework for human-AI co-authorship. TED speaker. Writer-in-residence, Gropius Bau.
Panel role: The practitioner. Co-authoring worlds with AI — where does the human ritual end and the machine generation begin?
Speakers — Artifice
ARTIFICE
RENAISE KIM
Founder, Studio Artifice
New York City
Built the WHITEBOX / BLACKBOX framework across five years — nodes:i at the Processing Foundation, SIGHTS: SCIENCE // FICTION, installations at ONX in Tribeca. Leads the worldsite practice: designed environments bridging URL to IRL. Science fiction as prototyping method.
Panel role: Co-lead. Worldsite framework. The finding on trust.
ARTIFICE
SARAH KIM
Communications Manager
Artifice NYC
Manages Artifice's external narrative across editorial, press, and institutional channels. Bridges internal language — WHITEBOX/BLACKBOX, worldsites — into public-facing communication without flattening it.
Panel role: The translator. Describing a world to someone who hasn't been inside it.
ARTIFICE
WOO KIM
Art Director
Artifice NYC
Directs the visual identity of Artifice's productions. Responsible for the texture, material, and shape decisions that translate concept into encounter — from event design to brand work.
Panel role: The surface author. What texture, what material, what shape.
Panel Structure
I. 20 min
THE FICTION
What does science fiction know that engineering doesn't?
Quest-led. Ross opens: worldbuilding as design practice — "constructing cultures, rules and experiences that feel coherent and alive." Julian grounds the diegetic prototype. K speaks to co-authoring with AI — the lived experiment of building worlds with a machine trained on every world that came before.
II. 20 min
THE SPACE
What happens when the fiction gets a floor?
Artifice-led. Renaise introduces the worldsite — the designed environment where speculative fiction becomes physical. Woo walks through specific translations: how a concept becomes a room. Sarah addresses the gap between fiction and communication — describing a world to someone who hasn't been inside it yet.
The Finding
PEOPLE TRUST WHAT THEY'VE WALKED THROUGH MORE THAN WHAT THEY'VE BEEN SHOWN.
EVEN WHEN THEY UNDERSTOOD THE MECHANISM BETTER IN WHITEBOX.
The immersive condition produces belief independently of comprehension.
Observed across five years: nodes:i at the Processing Foundation, SIGHTS: SCIENCE // FICTION, WHITEBOX installations at ONX Studio, Tribeca.
If that's true for a weekend installation, what does it mean for the worlds being generated and inhabited at scale — by people who never chose to enter them?
Why FWB Fest
Most of the people at FWB Fest spend their working lives constructing digital environments — products, platforms, interfaces, communities. They already build worlds. What they rarely get is the chance to look at those worlds from the outside, through a lens that isn't a quarterly review or a product roadmap.
That's what science fiction offers this audience specifically: a way to look at the thing you're building as if someone else built it, in a different time, under different assumptions. Ross noticed the same thing from his desk at Base — the tools of worldbuilding are identical whether you're writing a novel or designing a brand. The only difference is who gets to read it before it ships.
FWB Fest puts eight hundred of those builders in the same physical space for three days. The community already exists online. The festival is where it picks up weather, acoustics, the particular friction of sharing a room. This panel belongs in that room because the audience already lives inside the question — they just haven't had the language for it yet.
Logistics
Run of Show
Sets the room. One question. Two sides. Quest builds in fiction. Artifice builds in space.
Ross → Julian → K. Science fiction as design method.
Ross → Renaise → Woo → Sarah. From fiction to material. URL to IRL.
Open floor. Ross moderates.
Renaise closes. Quest writes the prototype. Artifice gives it a floor.
QUEST BUILDS WORLDS AT THE URL — ROSS GENDELS PUBLISHES FICTION WHERE EVERY STORY HAS ITS OWN CULTURE, ITS OWN RULES, ITS OWN WAY OF BREAKING. FIVE HUNDRED WRITERS SUBMITTED TO THE FIRST ISSUE BECAUSE THEY RECOGNIZED THE PREMISE: THE WORLD ALREADY FEELS LIKE SOMEONE ELSE'S STORY, AND SCI-FI IS HOW YOU WRITE YOUR OWN.
ARTIFICE BUILDS WORLDS AT THE IRL — ROOMS WHERE THOSE FICTIONS PICK UP TEMPERATURE, MATERIAL, THE SMELL OF KOJI FERMENTING IN A LAB AND THE WEIGHT OF A BLACKED-OUT ROOM WHERE YOU CONTROL WHAT HAPPENS WITH YOUR BODY. THE PANEL IS THE FIRST TIME THESE TWO PRACTICES SIT IN THE SAME PLACE AND TRACE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A STORY LEAVES THE PAGE AND BECOMES SOMETHING YOU CAN WALK THROUGH.
QUEST x ARTIFICE
FWB FEST 2026
INFO@STUDIOARTIFICE.COM