RSD 15 - Data in relation
VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
Transformation
Generative Islands
A systemic design fiction experiment for the Seapunkverse
Zach Hyman ¹, Jules Yim ²
Seapunk Studios
KEYWORD
#systemic design #design fiction #climate imaginaries
#worldbuilding #generative storytelling
Generative Islands is an experimental community prototype making the Seapunkverse — a Southeast Asian climate imaginary built by many hands — explorable as a systemic, relational storyscape. Visitors enter by place, by character, or by story: walking flooded realms, talking with their inhabitants, and reading published narratives as navigable places. Every place, inhabitant, protocol and story is authored canon; only the conversations are generated, live, from each entity’s human-reviewed record. With explicit consent, visitors’ own offerings are folded back into the shared world.
CREATIVE PROCESS
The future post-climate collapse world of Seapunk has grown and evolved through digital and in-person convenings over the years, the outputs of which have become a shared database of 79 entities. Creators approve each voice in a common review sheet before it can speak; the exhibit assembles conversations only from those human-reviewed fields, and an adversarial test suite checks that characters stay inside their worlds.
IMPLICATIONS & NEXT STEPS
The exhibit is a live research site for recursive worldbuilding: exploration leads to interrogation, and interrogation to contribution. Visitor submissions are logged in a review database until a person folds them into canon, so the map and its entities are expanded by its visitors over time, and the infrastructure stays extensible to new realms and communities.
References
Hu, B. A., Chua, S., & Rong, H. (2026). Protocol futuring: Speculating second-order dynamics of protocols in sociotechnical infrastructural futures. CHI ’26. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790527
Chua, S., & Yim, J. (2026, May). Imaginary decolonization: Seapunk & the search for authentic Southeast Asian solarpunk futures. Imaginary Decolonization Conference, Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Hyman, Z. L. (2025). Loyalty. In Ethereum Foundation (Ed.), Protocolized. https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/loyalty