Mateas & Stern · via Lüneburg / GAPPP (2018)
What it says
Two different things get called agency.
- Local agency — I press, something happens, I see it happen. Immediate and perceptible.
- Global agency — I understand that my choices are accumulating into a structure, and that where I am now is a consequence of what I did earlier.
A system can deliver the first while completely failing the second.
Does it hold for my work
It explains a result I had noticed without being able to name. Lüneburg’s open-world experiments left audiences describing the work as chaotic — not because nothing responded, but because nothing accumulated. Local agency was intact; global agency was absent, and the audience read that absence as noise.
Phosphor is an open world. It has exactly this risk, and it is a sharper diagnosis than “the mappings are not legible”: architecture to reverb is a local relation, and even if I fix the other two, nothing in the piece currently accumulates.
What it asks of the design
If the thesis installation wants global agency, something has to persist between actions — a score, a state, a change to the world that stays changed. That is a structural requirement, not a polish item, and it is one of the concrete things adding a feedback loop actually means.
Under v4
With several strangers acting at once, global agency gets harder and more interesting at the same time: nobody can trace the accumulated state to their own actions alone. Whether that reads as shared authorship or as chaos is close to being the research question.