The millennial trajectory of human progress is intricately linked to a foundational element—silicon. From the earliest stages of civilisation to the present digital era, silicon has served as both a literal and metaphorical cornerstone in human technological and cultural evolution. This element, which constitutes the second most abundant component of the earth’s crust after oxygen, has accompanied humanity from the prehistoric Stone Age to the realm of Artificial Intelligence. (Asunción López-Varela Azcárate, Techno-Poïesis and Intermedial Semiosis in David O’Reilly’s Videogame Everything)
Happy to share the announcement of the publication of Literature as an Art Form – Evolving Intermedial Literary Landscape.
Literature as an Art Form – Evolving Intermedial Literary Landscape brings together sixteen scholarly contributions that explore literature’s ongoing transformation across media, cultures, and technologies. This anthology traces the dynamic interplay between literature and visual, sonic, performative, and algorithmic forms, ranging from illuminated manuscripts and oral traditions to digital texts and anime. Rejecting the notion of literature as a fixed verbal art, the chapters highlight its status as a transmedial, evolving practice, shaped by and shaping the environments in which it is situated. Each essay examines how literature migrates across modalities, revealing it as a mutable process of techno-poïesis. Together, they offer a compelling vision of literature not as an autonomous artefact, but as a fluid cultural phenomenon whose conditions of existence are inseparable from intermedial exchange. (Press Release)
The book was edited by Asunción López-Varela Azcárate (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain), and includes some quite interesting essays at the borderlands of semiotics, techno-virtuality, and literature.
The Table of Contents with links to the open access chapters follows below along with the editor's introductory chapter: Asunción López-Varela Azcárate, Techno-Poïesis and Intermedial Semiosis in David O’Reilly’s Videogame Everything, which provides a quite intriguing engagement with the emerging dialectics reconstitution of both fields of knowledge and their manifestation in the interactions of humans with their environment--natural and virtual--and vice versa.
Table of Contents
Open access chapters
By Asunción López-Varela Azcárate
13By Nicoleta Popa Blanariu
8By Ovidiu Morar
21By Lilach Naishtat
100By Thiago Barbosa Soares
45By Peter Schmidt
13By Boutheina Boughnim
15By Paulo Roberto Ramos
5By Peter Ernest Razzell
14Techno-Poïesis and Intermedial Semiosis in David O’Reilly’s Videogame Everything
Submitted: 03 February 2025 Reviewed: 03 March 2025 Published: 04 April 2025
DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.1009927
From the Edited Volume
Literature as an Art Form - Evolving Intermedial Literary Landscape
Asunción López-Varela Azcárate
1. Introduction
The term “techno-poïesis” refers to an interdisciplinary approach that explores meaning-making processes across various media, embracing a holistic view that positions everything that exists, whether organic or inorganic, material and inmaterial, human or nonhuman, as part of a continuum [1]. Aristotle’s notion of poïesis, at the root of the term poetry, did not merely refer to artistic expression. It meant a mode of bringing-forth or enacting an act of creation that transformed potential into actuality (Metaphysics, 1048a) [2]. Poïesis is foundational to human agency, enabling the articulation of knowledge through symbolic forms that intertwine imagination, materiality, and action.
Aristotle also distinguished between two kinds of knowledge: “episteme” (theoretical knowledge) and “techne” (practical or productive knowledge). Techne referred to the know-how or craftsmanship required to produce something, and this is where the connection to the etymological meaning of art as “skill” becomes clear. For Aristotle, art is a form of “techne”, where a person applies learned techniques to achieve a specific outcome. Aristotle did not treat art as the aesthetic pursuit of beauty, or a form of personal subjective and intersubjective expression, as Renaissance and particularly Romantic perspectives would do [3], but as an intellectual and systematic craft grounded in mimetic principles. Using the example of tragic drama, he considered all forms of artistic representation an imitation of life involving intentional actions. Techno-poïesis seeks to extend Aristotle’s ideas by aligning them with those of Harvard semiotician Charles S. Peirce.
Peirce claimed that there was “a continuity between the characters of mind and matter.”(CP: 6.277, 1893) [4]. He meant that mental and material phenomena are interconnected through universal laws, proposing that the material and the immaterial are governed by these tendencies. These ideas were part of his dynamic and systemic view of causality, which integrated habits, laws, and potentialities into a model that transcended Aristotle’s teleological ideas of a moving agent. Just as Aristotle considered poetry to be a means of exploring universal truths through analogy and metaphor, the techno-poetic lens reveals how a wide conception of intermediality contributes to the understanding of symbiotic relations and distributed forms of agency across different mediums, including the biological and the technological [5].
This exploration also aligns with contemporary theoretical trends in fields such as neomaterialism, posthumanism, and ecocritical approaches, where the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the artificial (human-made), the material and the immaterial are being questioned and redefined. The techno-poetic perspective acknowledges that humans and nonhumans, including not only biological beings but also inorganic matter and complex technological artefacts, all participate in the unfolding of reality, reaffirming the generative power of art in its widest sense.
The term “art” comes from the Latin ars, meaning “skill,” “craft,” or “discipline.” It is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root ar-, meaning “to fit together” or “to join,” which underlies concepts of skill, order, and technique. “Ars” thus originally referred to a form of know-how (“techne”), especially in the context of manual craftsmanship or the application of certain techniques. Over time, its meaning expanded to encompass a wider range of human endeavours, including the creation of artistic works, gradually understood as expressions of human imagination.
The historical evolution of the concept of art goes hand in hand with the changes in knowledge systems or “epistemes,” highlighting the transition from mytho-poetic analogic frameworks in oral cultures, to analytical and referential reasoning practices in later periods. Michel Foucault’s [6] and Timothy Reiss’s [7] ideas illustrate how different epistemes coexist and interact, representing shifting power-knowledge systems. Reiss’s analysis, for instance, demonstrates the shift from pattern-based mytho-poetic thinking to more abstract, analytical modes of thought. These transitions have always been related to technological advances, propitiating what Thomas Kuhn termed “paradigm shifts” [8].
This opening chapter of Literature as an Art Form examines the concept of “techno-poïesis” within intermedial meaning-making processes, positioning it as a conceptual bridge between scientific, philosophical, and artistic knowledge systems. Through this lens, the chapter traces the evolution of cultural, ontological, and epistemological dimensions toward process-systemic paradigms. While the first section is primarily theoretical, the second part explores David O’Reilly’s videogame, Everything, as an illustrative case study to demonstrate key philosophical concepts in practice. The analysis aligns with posthumanist perspectives that challenge human-centred subjectivity, as well as neomaterialist approaches that emphasise the intricate interrelations between human and nonhuman forces. These frameworks question anthropocentric notions of human exceptionalism, recognising the agency and vitality of nonhuman entities.
2. The continuum of life and the distribution of agencies
Viewed in comparison to Foucault and Reiss, where episteme is seen as a historical and cultural framework of knowledge governing a specific era through particular power relations and discursive formations, Aristotle, in contrast, only referred to it as universal, theoretical knowledge grounded in logic and reason, independent of historical contexts and linked to objective universal unmoving truths. This conception is related to his ideas on causality, found notably in his Physics (Book II, Chapters 3–9) [9] and Metaphysics (Book V, Chapter 2) [2], which were among the first attempts to explain agency.
Aristotle formulated four causes that explain why things exist or occur by identifying four types of causes—material (the substance from which something is made), formal (the defining characteristics), efficient (the initiating agent or mover), and final (the purpose or end goal). In Aristotle’s view, final causes were central, as they provided the rationale for existence, often linked to intrinsic purposes or functions, even in natural phenomena, as captured in his assertion that nature does nothing in vain (Physics 194a23-32) [9]. However, Peirce contended that it was an “error to think that a final cause is necessarily a purpose. A purpose is merely that form of the final cause which is most familiar to our experience” (CP: 1.211, 1902) [4]. Thus, he rejected the notion that final causes are exclusively tied to intentions. Peirce argued that final causality encompasses broader patterns, laws, and tendencies that guide processes over time, often independent of intentionality [4].
Peirce’s systemic understanding of a continuum in everything that exists, which he termed “synechism” [10] is aligned with the algorithmic patterns and recursive processes present in contemporary digital projects like David O’Reilly’s videogame, Everything [11]. Peirce’s recognition of the complexity inherent in the natural world led him to describe laws as probabilistic rather than strictly deterministic—emerging from diversity and spontaneous occurrences rather than following rigid, mechanical patterns (CP: 1.161, 1897) [4]. As Peirce famously observed, “What we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hidebound with habits” (CP: 6.158, 1892) [4]. This statement highlights his view that even matter retains a dynamic, quasi-mental dimension, governed by evolving patterns and habits. Peirce’s ideas suggest a scaling of agency that differentiates between humans and nonhumans, as well as animate and inanimate entities.
Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, crystals and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colours, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. […] Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. But as there cannot be a General without Instances embodying it, so there cannot be thought without Signs. We must here give “Sign” a very wide sense, no doubt, but not too wide a sense to come within our definition. Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may further be declared that there can be no isolated sign (CP: 4.551, 1906) [4].
Peirce sees cognition as not limited to human brains but emerging through interactions by means of signs within the physical world. This conceptual framework anticipates contemporary discussions in the cognitive sciences regarding how to scale up the interactions between entities and their environments. Peirce’s conception challenges Cartesian dualisms by situating purpose and mechanism within a continuum, thereby highlighting their reciprocal relationship in forming emergent patterns, regularities, and laws. This framework harmoniously integrates teleological and mechanistic perspectives, showing that final causality finds expression through the organising structures of efficient causality. Rather than being opposed, final and efficient causes are mutually constitutive within a dynamic continuum of evolution and habit formation. This holistic view finds echoes in contemporary enactivist and material engagement theories, which emphasise emergent, self-generating processes of cognition.
Lambros Malafouris’s Material Engagement Theory (MET) builds on this Peircean framework by advocating for a distributed and emergent understanding of agency. Like Peirce, Malafouris views cognitive processes as continuous with the material world, where agency emerges from dynamic couplings between humans, artefacts, and environments. This conceptualisation dissolves the sharp boundary between subject and object, placing humans and their material engagements “in the middle” of a co-evolutionary system of meaning-making. As he puts it:
The functional anatomy of the human mind (which includes the whole organism, that is, brain/CNS and body) is a dynamic bio-cultural construct subject to continuous ontogenetic and phylogenetic transformation by behaviourally important and socially embedded experiences. These experiences are mediated and sometimes constituted by the use of material objects and artefacts (e.g., the blind man’s stick) which for that reason should be seen as continuous, integral, and active parts of the human cognitive architecture ([12], p. 244).
The implications of this integrated view are profound: rather than seeing cognition as contained solely within the mind, it becomes an active, semiotic engagement with the material environment where symbols and artefacts participate in thought processes. Peirce’s notion that “thought is not necessarily connected with a brain” (CP: 4.551, 1906) [4] finds clear echoes in Malafouris’s claim that artefacts, such as a “blind man’s stick,” are integral, active components of the cognitive architecture ([12], p. 244). Both perspectives see cognition as an emergent process shaped by engagement with signs and material things that exert corresponding actions in the human world.
MET’s conception of agency also resonates with Peirce’s semiotic philosophy by challenging subject-object dualisms and redefining the locus of causality. As Malafouris states, “agency and intentionality may not be properties of things, but they are not properties of humans either; they are the properties of material engagement, that is, of the grey zone where brain, body, and culture conflate” ([13], p. 22). This perspective aligns with Peirce’s view that cognitive processes extend into the material and organic environment, forming a continuum where signs, matter, and minds coalesce.
Malafouris’s example of clay as a material that affords a flow of noetic activity illustrates how material engagement enhances neural plasticity and shapes cognition. The potter-clay interaction exemplifies this: while the potter might make decisions, the clay’s texture, physical properties, and responsiveness co-determine the actions performed. As Malafouris aptly remarks, “trying to separate cause from effect inside the loop of pottery making is like trying to construct a pot while keeping your hands clean from the mud” ([13], p. 25).
This scenario aligns with Peirce’s rejection of linear, deterministic causality in favour of a probabilistic, habit-forming model where causes and effects emerge reciprocally. As aforementioned, Peirce viewed final and efficient causes as mutually constitutive within a continuum, similar to Malafouris’ symmetrical relationships between the potter and clay. In both frameworks, external factors—including tools and materials—are not passive. The potter’s wheel “shapes the field of action and has a share and say on our will and intentions” ([13], p. 28). This recalls Peirce’s assertion that even inanimate matter is not “completely dead, but merely mind hidebound with habits” (CP: 6.158, 1892) [4], suggesting that material structures possess dynamic properties that influence human engagement.
Malafouris further argues that agency must be decoupled from subject-object distinctions and dissociated from intentionality as a uniquely human property. He recalls the distinction between “prior intention” and “intention in action,” emphasising that in the latter, internal intentional states and external movements become indistinguishable yet produce pragmatic effects in the world. Ultimately, agency is seen as a temporal and interactively emergent property of activity rather than an innate and fixed attribute of the human condition. As Malafouris observes, “the ultimate cause of action in this chain of micro and macro events is none of the supposed agents, humans or nonhumans; it is the flow of activity itself” ([13], p. 35). This perspective aligns closely with Peirce’s conception of semiosis as an ongoing process where signs generate new interpretants in an endless continuum of meaning-making, where the non-conscious quasi-minds of nonhumans and tech tools, like AI can operate semiotically even if out-of-awareness.
To conclude this section, the techno-poetic reinterpretation of Aristotle’s poïesis (often translated as “production”) finds a compelling parallel in Peirce’s process-oriented philosophy and in MET perspectives, highlighting the dynamic and creative unfolding of creation. Poïesis emerges as an ongoing, iterative process characterised by the interplay between efficient and final causes, an interaction that creates a bridge between theoretical knowledge and creative practice as well as between stability and transformation. In this light, artistic production becomes a negotiation between habitual structures and emergent possibilities.
Peirce’s emphasis on the probabilistic nature of causality and the evolving nature of habits allows poïesis to be conceptualised not merely as the realisation of predetermined forms, but as a living process of material engagement and conceptual production. This expanded understanding situates art not as a static object but as a dynamic form of poïesis that foregrounds the symbolic, affective, and material dimensions of experience. Thus, the techno-poetic framework resonates with the transformative role of technological advancements, particularly those that introduce new ways of perceiving the world through optical instruments. From early innovations like microscopes and telescopes to contemporary screen technologies and virtual spaces, tools that have not only augmented visual perception, but also reshaped the very processes by which knowledge is generated, structured, and understood. Technological mediation thus becomes a form of poïesis—a recursive and evolving act of creation that reconfigures perception, cognition, and knowledge.
In Peircean terms, such technological mediation embodies a continuum where signs, material instruments, and technologies co-participate in shaping epistemological frameworks. Just as poïesis bridges theoretical understanding and artistic production, technology as poïesis fosters new interpretive engagements that dissolve rigid distinctions between art, science, and cognition. These iterative transformations reveal a dynamic world in which perception and meaning are continuously reshaped through evolving interactions between human thought, material artefacts, and symbolic systems.
David O’Reilly’s Everything [11] can be seen as a contemporary site of techno-poïesis, where narrative, visual representation, and technological mediation intertwine to produce dynamic, emergent forms of meaning-making. The work illustrates how technological environments reconfigure perception and cognition, fostering an interconnected understanding that transcends rigid disciplinary divides. Viewed through a process-oriented lens aligned with Peirce’s semiotic and causal frameworks, Everything becomes a site where art, science, and technology converge in iterative cycles of creation and interpretation.
In O’Reilly’s digital environment, self-generating systems exhibit emergent tendencies and regularities oriented toward evolving patterns rather than explicit, predetermined outcomes. This dynamic process exemplifies the interplay between Peirce’s concepts of efficient and final causality. Efficient causality, manifest through chains of mechanisms, laws, and habits, provides the material structure through which events unfold. However, without final causality—understood as a guiding purpose or orienting principle—efficient causality risks evolving into incoherent, aimless processes. Likewise, final causality without efficient manifestation remains a mere potentiality, incapable of material realisation. In Everything, this reciprocal relationship is exemplified by the game’s capacity to move forward even when left unattended. The system’s patterns and regularities are not imposed externally, but emerge from recursive intra-actions, embodying Peirce’s idea that “habit-taking” governs the evolution of complex systems. In this sense, O’Reilly’s work illustrates how technological mediation becomes a form of techno-poïesis, where efficient and final causes coalesce in a continuum of creative expression and emergent meaning.
3. Myth-matters: The importance of the material in creative poïesis
Techno-poïesis acknowledges the entanglement of symbolic narratives (including art and myth) with material realities such as instruments, technologies, and the social processes that enable their evolution. This framework not only emphasises the creative interplay between materiality and symbolic systems but also recognises how myths actively mediate human understanding rather than merely serving as narrative fictions. As José Manuel Losada indicates, “Myth is a functional, symbolic, and thematic account of extraordinary events with a sacred, supernatural, and transcendent referent, lacking, in principle, historical testimony and referring to an individual or collective cosmogony or eschatology that is always absolute” ([14], p. 193).
Across diverse cultures, cosmogonic myths frequently position natural elements, particularly stones, as foundational materials in creation narratives. They symbolise the origins of life and the cosmos, and the link with the divine. Some examples are the Black Stone of Mecca, the Omphalos or navel of the world at the sanctuary of Delphi in ancient Greece, the stones with the inscription of the Ten Commandments in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, the sacred stone of the Celtic St. Brigid in Ireland, or the Stone of Destiny associated with the coronation of Scottish kings. In their respective traditions, these ancient narratives, around a simple object like a stone, serve as symbolic points of veneration, where some natural objects have become sacred, fulfilling mythical functions.
Plato’s Timaeus, for example, presents a cosmological account in which the four elements or “stoicheion” (earth, air, fire, and water), signify the link between bio-principles, geometry, and mathematical replicative structures based on harmonic analogies connected to both syllables and numbers. He draws an analogy between the composition of these elements and the structure of language, highlighting his belief in a universal logic underlying all languages (Timaeus 53c) [15]. Just as syllables can recombine to produce endless variations of words, the four elements transform and combine to produce the diversity of phenomena in the physical world. The notion of the universe as a kind of “textuality,” written by the Demiurge, and including a sort of coded language half way between human discourse and mathematical replicative code, shows interesting parallels with the understanding of digital creation.
These narratives often reflect the intricate interplay between the natural world, human creativity, and the tools and acts of engineering used in artistic practices. While many creation epics depict life on earth as the outcome of cosmic struggles, with primordial gods engaged in conflicts that ultimately shape the universe, these acts are often supported by advanced technologies. In myths, creation is often framed through acts of separation and ordering of primordial natural substances.
Intriguingly, while stones often contain silica, this component is also present in clay minerals, whose technological significance has endured across millennia, from early flint stone tools and Neolithic mud habitats to its central role in the digital technologies that define Silicon Valley. The persistent motif of silica-containing materials and clay as instruments of creation resonates deeply with mythic narratives of creation. For instance, in ancient Mesopotamia, the Sumerian god Enki, aided by the primordial goddess Nammu, shapes humanity from clay extracted from the abyss. Later, in Tablet VI of the Babylonian Enūma Eliš humankind is formed from clay mixed with the blood of a defeated chaos god, showing the symbolic link between the creation of human life and elemental materials ([16], p. 51); ([17], pp. 35–37); ([18], p. 70). Greek mythology echoes these themes through Prometheus, who moulds the first humans from clay [19]. Egyptian cosmogonies feature Khnum, the potter god, creating life forms on his wheel ([20], pp. 396–399). Some studies suggest that the biblical Genesis account, in which God forms the first man from clay and breathes life into him (Genesis 1:11), draws upon earlier traditions, echoed also in Islamic scripture (Qur’an 23:12 mentioned in Hjelm and Thompson [21], pp. 68–72). These narratives not only emphasise clay’s materiality but also frame technological processes, instruments, and tools as related to divine acts of creation [22].
By examining these creation myths through the lens of materiality and technological agency, it becomes evident that these narratives reflect humanity’s deep-seated engagement with the processes of making and transformation. In a striking parallel, contemporary biochemical studies highlight the creative capacity of silica at the molecular level. Jack Szostak’s work on the origins of life suggests that clay minerals may have played a catalytic role in the formation of RNA, one of life’s essential building blocks. This intersection between ancient myth and scientific discovery highlights an enduring intuition: creation is a dynamic process mediated by elemental materials [23]. The persistence of these motifs, as in the term “Silicon Valley,” reveals how they continue to shape the contemporary understanding of creativity and technological progress.
4. Elementary, my dear readers: From the flint stones to contemporary microchips
The millennial trajectory of human progress is intricately linked to a foundational element—silicon. From the earliest stages of civilisation to the present digital era, silicon has served as both a literal and metaphorical cornerstone in human technological and cultural evolution. This element, which constitutes the second most abundant component of the earth’s crust after oxygen, has accompanied humanity from the prehistoric Stone Age to the realm of Artificial Intelligence.
Silicon is not only prevalent in inorganic matter but also integral to biological life. In the human body, it functions as a structural component of skin, nails, bones, and connective tissues. It might be no coincidence that ancient creation myths often depict humanity as being shaped from primordial silicon-rich clay. In its earliest applications, silicon, primarily in the form of flint, played a pivotal role in tools that allowed Homo Faber to carve, cut, and ignite fire. Clay was also the base of pottery, ceramics, and glass, enabling the construction of dwellings, vessels, and writing surfaces. Flint stone, in particular, became a crucial medium for early communication, from petroglyphs to sacred monuments that served as mnemonic markers of collective memory. The Greek term sêma, which forms the root of semiotics, highlights the connection between stone markers and the development of sign systems in early human societies [24]. Monumental inscriptions, such as those on the Rosetta Stone, or the tablets narrating the Epic of Gilgamesh, highlight the significance of silica-based materials in the evolution of written language. Scandinavian rune stones, Celtic Ogham inscriptions, and iconic megalithic sites like Stonehenge further illustrate the sacred and communicative roles of silicon-bearing structures. These instances of early writing and symbolic representation demonstrate the profound interrelation between human cognitive development and the material properties of silicon.
One of silicon’s most remarkable properties is its capacity for doping—a process through which impurities are introduced to alter its conductivity. This characteristic, which has enabled the development of modern electronics, resonates with ancient beliefs that minerals possessed inherent sacred and magic qualities. In medieval alchemy, silicon was attributed to healing properties, and in contemporary science, it has effectively become the Philosopher’s Stone of the Digital Revolution. It underpins all modern knowledge-supporting devices, from computers and smartphones to AI systems. The enduring significance of silicon illustrates how small things and seemingly humble materials have shaped the course of human development, both technologically and culturally. Silicon embodies the continuity between materiality and the symbolic systems through which humans understand and reshape the world.
David O’Reilly’s Everything [11] offers a reflection on these ideas by dissolving the boundaries between the natural and digital worlds, illustrating the dynamic agency embedded in elemental substances and their technological extensions. As players navigate diverse worlds where objects, no matter how small, hold transformative potential, the game echoes the historical and philosophical trajectory of elemental matter. This thread, intermedially and semiotically linking myth, materiality, and technological poïesis, highlights the intricate interplay between the material foundations of life and the symbolic architectures that define human creativity and knowledge.
5. Being “In the Middle”
Conceived, directed, and financed by David O’Reilly over the course of almost four years, Everything [11] and its animated short [25], which encapsulates the core experience of the videogame, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, earning an Oscar nomination in 2017. The game offers an immersive exploration of a micro and macroscopic universe, enabling players to engage symbiotically with a vast array of entities. The game experience aligns with the notion of intermedial co-agencies discussed earlier, wherein the technological medium is not merely a conduit, but an active participant in shaping cognitive and affective learning. In its incorporation of role-play, free-play (sandbox), and simulation, the game allows users to approach reality from diverse perspectives. It also enables emergent self-organising interactions, for the game experience can also advance without direct human intervention, embodying forms of “auto-poïesis” like those found in natural life [26]. Nathan Grayson [27] described how the game continues autonomously when left unattended, emphasising the ungovernable enactive agencies of nature and existence [27].
Everything foregrounds a deep ecological and neomaterialist perspective by drawing attention to the interconnectedness of the material and the immaterial as well as the organic and the inorganic. By allowing players to navigate the cosmos from multiple perspectives—ranging from basic chemical elements and microscopic bacteria to celestial bodies—the game creates a sense of fluidity that reorients the player’s perception of selfhood, scale, and agency. This positioning “in the middle” destabilises the conventional subject-object dichotomy, offering an experience in which players perceive themselves as a part of the broader continuum of life, as Peirce would have it. The immersive spatiality of the game encourages the experience of being in relation to everything else, situating the player as an observer attuned to their surroundings. The game invites players to traverse a mythic space where all entities coexist symbiotically, recalling the relational ontologies present in various creation myths discussed earlier. The spatial immersion of Everything also transforms the player’s understanding of their place within the universe, fostering a phenomenological awareness of interconnectedness and mutual dependency. In contrast to traditional videogames that often emphasise goal-oriented progress and linear narratives, Everything invites the player to adopt a contemplative stance, where players come to perceive themselves as integral parts of a complex, ever-changing web of life.
The sense of agency enabled by the game dynamics is not based on control, mastery, or domination, but on a sense of cooperation with the rest of nonhuman entities in the world. Like Peirce and Malafouris, Karen Barad’s [28] theory of agential realism posits that agency is not an inherent property of individuals, but an emergent phenomenon arising from intra-actions within a network of relations, ideas that can be seen in Everything, where the players’ actions are part of a larger self-organising system. The videogame’s mechanics further reinforce this notion by enabling elements within the game world to move and evolve independently of the player’s direct input. This auto-poietic quality mirrors real-world ecosystems, where individual entities influence and are influenced by the broader environmental context, emphasising a relational, rather than autonomous, sense of existence.
Beyond its programming, the choices made in its conceptualisation—such as the inclusion of Alan Watts’ philosophical discourse, and the framing of the experience as a meditative reflection, highlight the ways in which human cultural narratives steer storytelling in digital environments. Watt’s audio track frames the game within a specific discourse of holistic thinking influenced by Eastern philosophies that emphasise the interconnectedness of all beings. Everything can also be seen as an example of what Bruno Latour described as the co-production of technology and culture—where technological artefacts are not neutral tools, but rather entangled with cultural values, histories, and ideologies. Latour’s work has shaped contemporary neomaterialists perspectives such as Sheila Jasanoff’s [29] or Barad’s agential realism, as well as her notion of “intra-actions”, concepts that connect interestingly with Watt’s and Peirce’s belief in the existence as part of a larger interwoven evolving continuum.
Every creature in the universe that is in any way sensitive and in any manner of speaking conscious regards itself as a being. That is to say, it knows and is aware of a hierarchy of beings above it and a hierarchy of beings below it […] That is to say that wherever you are, and whoever you are, you are in the middle (Watts, We as Organism, 1.4.5. s.p. emphasis added) [30].
In my view, Everything encourages a contemplative experience of being perpetually “in the middle” of interconnected realities, an experience enabled by the 3D environment itself (unlike 2D, which only allows experiences from the outside of the representation). The game turns its attention to the simplest entities and elements in nature, like the clay minerals discussed before, revealing the symbiotic relationships between organisms and their environments. Players transition between microscopic and macroscopic worlds, inhabiting the forms of both organic and inorganic matter, recalling Jane Bennett’s observation that inorganic matter is vibrant, although it might appear immobile. This is so because “its becoming proceeds at a rate below the threshold of human discernment” ([31], p. vii). Thus, as Watts had claimed, perspective becomes essential:
You can look at something with a naked eye and see it in a certain way; you look at it with a telescope and you see it in another way. Which level of magnification is the correct one? Well, obviously, they are all correct; they are just different points of view. You can, for example, look at a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass and where, with the naked eye, you will see a human face, with a magnifying glass you will just see a profusion of dots rather meaninglessly scattered. But as you stand away from that collection of dots, which all seem to be separate and apart from each other, they suddenly arrange themselves into a pattern (We as Organism, 1.4.5. s.p.) [30].
Everything is a mythical world of metamorphic matter that seems to acquire a life of its own, as different species meet, in Donna Haraway’s terms [32]. As Stacy Alaimo has also noted, we must imagine a “trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world […] ultimately inseparable from the environment” ([33], p. 2). This assertion echoes Watts’ ideas that every entity is part of an intricate network where everything depends on everything else:
It is not only that every little organism that exists depends on its total environment. The reverse is also true, that the total environment depends on each and every one of those little organisms so that you could say this universe consists of an arrangement or pattern in which every event is essential to the whole thing (Work as Play, s.p.) [34].
The videogame invites us to a sort of transmutation across time and space, hand in hand with the metamorphoses of natural life itself. It is not a question of following a path in search of our destiny, but about tracing our own itinerary in the dance of things and signs: “[Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting anywhere” (Watts, “Work as Play” s.p.) [34]. In life’s dance of forms and signs, dancers need to learn to choreographically position themselves “in the middle,” in a habitat that is simultaneously material and immaterial, real (experiential) and virtual (conceptual and symbolic), shared with everything else that exits. Like other process ontologies, the ideological framework in Everything no longer depicts life as emerging from the hands of a divine potter who shapes human existence from clay. Instead, the creation process is reminiscent of Plato’s Demiurge-engineer, who encodes algorithmic instructions, such as Fibonacci sequences, to enable life’s self-replication without further divine intervention.
In Everything, mythical creation finds a contemporary expression in the poïesis of the algorithm, as players witness the agency embedded in the smallest elements and entities. In its millennia-spanning journey from early flint tools to the silicon microchips behind digital technologies, silica acquires a vibrant agency as well as a symbolic expression, co-creating the dynamic patterns that shape our world.
6. Conclusion
Games like Everything play a significant role in shaping behaviour and attitudes through the process of gamification where, in educational settings, game mechanics are applied to non-game contexts to influence awareness, pro-social behaviour, and engagement, also promoting sustainable practices. Unlike conventional gamified experiences that rely on extrinsic motivators such as points and rewards, Everything encourages reflection rather than competition or problem-solving. This stands in contrast to other didactic games that might employ clear objectives, such as resource management challenges, climate change simulations, or conservation missions. In comparison, Everything presents an open non-linear exploration where progress with the game world is marked by a gradual realisation of interconnectedness rather than by task completion.
In environmental education, there is a growing recognition of the need to understand ecological relationships holistically rather than in isolation, and Everything embodies this principle by immersing the player in a universe where they can inhabit and experience the interconnectedness of all entities, shifting perspectives from microscopic to macroscopic scales. By offering an auto-poietic experience—where the game continues to evolve even without the player’s direct input—Everything also subtly criticises the human tendency to dominate and manage nature, promoting instead an ethos of coexistence.
In doing so, Everything resonates with the posthumanist perspectives that advocate for a decentred human subjectivity as well as with neomaterialist awareness of the intricate entanglements between human and more-than-human forces. These approaches challenge the anthropocentric belief in human exceptionalism and acknowledge the vitality and agency of nonhumans. The game’s auto-generative features further dismantle human-centric perspectives of goal-oriented progression by creating a universe that exists beyond anthropocentric intention and control. The game’s visual and narrative structure embodies nomadism and a transmutation reminiscent of mythic metamorphoses, positioning players as participants in the dance of existence, transitioning seamlessly between different states, and being defined not by individual autonomy but by interconnected multiplicities.
Ultimately, Everything exemplifies how digital media function as liminal spaces where human culture and technological agency converge, shaping and influencing each other. The game’s fluid perspective also suggests that technology has the potential to expand perception beyond anthropocentric limits while engaging with the cultural narratives that shape human interpretations of technological possibilities. Through this interplay, Everything invites reflection on the evolving relationship between humans and more-than-human agencies, including all the elements of nature as well as digital machines, emphasising their mutual imbrication in the construction of meaning in a digital AI mediated world.
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Abstract
Building on recent research in posthumanist and neomaterialist thought, the study considers a techno-poetic consciousness that blurs the distinction between the natural and the artificial (human-made) and pays attention to small but significant natural elements, silica in particular, and their deep influence on the development of human life and, more recently, digital culture. Adopting an intermedial semiotic approach, the chapter interweaves perspectives from semiotics, art, and mythology to analyse Everything, a videogame created by Irish filmmaker and game developer David O’Reilly. The game and its short video serve as a case study in the evolving landscape of interactive gaming. By shifting player perception through spatial immersion and scale traversal, Everything fosters a relational understanding of existence and challenges anthropocentric perspectives, with implications for eco-cultural education and gamification trends. In this way, the chapter discusses the evolving digital spaces of artistic creation.
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