--- title: "Rendering Scenario Fiction" description: "Nicolay Boyadjiev, Antikythera's design director, explains how the visual identity of the [Hemispherical Stacks](/work/journal/hemstacks) research unit was designed." type: "reading-notes" authors: - "Nicolay Boyadjiev" published: "2026-01-20" original_url: "https://antikythera.substack.com/p/rendering-scenario-fiction" canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/substack/2026-01-20-rendering-scenario-fiction" md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/substack/2026-01-20-rendering-scenario-fiction" last_updated: "2026-08-23" site: "Antikythera Wiki" --- # Rendering Scenario Fiction > Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below. - **Authors:** Nicolay Boyadjiev - **Published:** 2026-01-20 - **Kind:** Substack · Substack post - **Original:** https://antikythera.substack.com/p/rendering-scenario-fiction - **Length:** 713 words - **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/substack/2026-01-20-rendering-scenario-fiction - **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23 ## Summary [Nicolay Boyadjiev](https://antikythera.wiki/people/nicolay-boyadjiev), Antikythera's design director, explains how the visual identity of the [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks) research unit was designed. It is catalogued as an excerpt of that compendium but is a designer's account written alongside it. Its argument is that a genre which removes protagonists from the future needs a way of rendering images that does the same, and that the unit's fog shader is that rendering. ## The argument Boyadjiev first restates what [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/hemispherical-stacks) studies: the fragmentation of computational networks into transnational blocs, and the federations and antagonisms that may follow. The unit works through these by scenario fiction, which he positions against two neighbours. Scenario planning, the think-tank tool, supports decisions and limits disruption; science fiction is driven by plot and protagonist. Scenario fiction is meant to depersonalize the future and to foreground cause-and-effect chains, structural dynamics, and what he calls infrastructural trophic cascades, extrapolating near-future tensions in order to frame counterintuitive features of the present. The design question follows directly: how to render this genre, "both figuratively and literally." The answer has three parts. The images are "synthetic" in two senses: generated and visibly artificial, and composed from elements shared across scenarios so that all contributions read as one stream. They contain no main characters or humanoid figures; landscapes, environments, and interiors are the figures. And with the Milan studio Giga, which also built the algorithmic storytelling engine shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale's "The Next Earth" exhibition, the team built a bespoke rendering pipeline. Luminance and depth information are written into the colour channels of each image, giving every pixel a position in a reconstructed three-dimensional space. The cursor becomes a soft spotlight in that space; light falls off with distance, so what is near the pointer is lit and what is far fades into fog. A linear-burn tint differentiates the images while keeping them a set. Boyadjiev's closing claim is that this interaction is the right response to the brief. Carving through the fog makes the images sites to be explored rather than surfaces to be displayed, which presents the scenarios as provocations rather than prescriptions. Finding such an interpretive vocabulary, he says, is the design project itself. ## Section by section Boyadjiev's post moves from a research frame to a design method to a technical pipeline and back to a claim about design. It opens by introducing the Hemispherical Stacks research unit and its subject, the fragmentation of planetary computation into geopolitical blocs. The second paragraph defines Scenario Fiction against its two parents, scenario planning and science fiction, and notes that the approach has produced a first series of journal contributions. A one-line question then pivots to the design problem: how to render Scenario Fiction, figuratively and literally. Two paragraphs answer it at the level of imagery, explaining the choice of synthetic, combinatory pictures and the deliberate absence of protagonists. Two further paragraphs describe the work with Giga: the depth-mapping shader, the cursor-following light, the fog, and the linear-burn tint that unifies the set. A closing paragraph reads this interactive format back into the research brief, arguing that carving through the fog presents the scenarios as provocations rather than prescriptions, and that inventing such an interpretative vocabulary is the design project itself. Author and series notes follow. ## Key concepts - **[Scenario Fiction](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/scenario-fiction)** — a genre of institutional futurism that drops protagonists and plot in favour of structural and infrastructural cause-and-effect chains. - **Thick fog** — the unit's shader, which reconstructs depth from generated images and lets a cursor-driven light reveal or obscure each composite scene. ## Connections The genre defined here is the format of every piece in [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks). The rendering pipeline belongs to the same collaboration with Giga as the engine behind [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene). Boyadjiev says more about design as a mode of inquiry at Antikythera in [Nicolay Boyadjiev on media and design as inquiry](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/discourse-surface-boyadjiev-on-planetary-computation) and [Discourse™ X Nicolay Boyadjiev](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/discourse-giga-boyadjiev-interview). ## Terms used - [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/hemispherical-stacks) - [Scenario Fiction](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/scenario-fiction) ## Related works - [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks)