
Alice Bucknell
Los Angeles, CA
Alice Bucknell is an artist, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. with a particular interest in game engines and speculative fiction. Their recent work has focused on creating cinematic universes within game worlds, exploring the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge.
Their work has appeared internationally at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade Seoul, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, Gray Area in San Francisco, Medialab Matadero in Madrid, Singapore Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Fiber Festival in the Netherlands, and Serpentine in London, among others. Their writing appears in publications including ArtReview, e-flux architecture, frieze, the Harvard Design Magazine, and others.
In 2024, they are part of the Enter the Hyperscientific AiR program at EPFL in Lausanne, recipient of the Collide residency Award at CERN & Copenhagen Contemporary, and a Y11 member of NEW INC. Bucknell received a MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. They are a prior resident of Somerset House Studios in London and currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, where they teach courses on worlding, video games, and philosophies of technology.

Alice Bucknell, EARTH ENGINE, 2025. Video game. Image courtesy the artist.
Alice Bucknell, EARTH ENGINE, 2025. Video game, CGI image. Image courtesy the artist.
Alice Bucknell, EARTH ENGINE, 2025. Video game, CGI image. Image courtesy the artist.
Alice Bucknell, Staring at the Sun, 2025. Two-channel 4k video. Image courtesy the artist.
Alice Bucknell, The Alluvials Level 2: Extinction Burst, 2024. Video game. Image courtesy the artist.
Alice Bucknell, The Alluvials, 2022. Video game. Image courtesy the artist.
Earth Engine
Alice Bucknell is an artist, writer, and educator working with speculative fiction and game engines to create new pathways between ecology, technology, and nonhuman intelligence.
Artist BioEARTH ENGINE is broadly a game about climate futures and the paradox of predictive technologies that close down other possible futures.
The game builds on the emerging lore of EVEs (Earth Visualization Engines), digital Earth twins put forward as the future of climate research. Of particular interest to this project is the integration of gaming entertainment giants like Nvidia into the climate prediction space; to model a future climate is to gamify it while dictating a singular vision for a future world. Rejecting the idea of more data = more reality, EARTH ENGINE triangulates ideas of posthuman playability, ecological worlding, and planet as player.
Existing as something like an ecological tamagotchi, EARTH ENGINE aims to reorient the idea of ecological play away from predictive technologies; here, data becomes an affective and cryptic experience, an unknown known. The game is intended to be encountered on the intimacy of a personal desktop. It merges local climate data from one’s IP address with global climate projection visualizations. How this looks in practice: a simulated landscape, built from climate projection data translated to in-game ecological assets in real-time (geological formations, weather patterns, flora, etc). This world is refreshed daily. In other words, when the future projection changes, the landscape changes, too. Because EARTH ENGINE‘s simulated landscape combines global and local climate data, each player’s world also looks different.
In EARTH ENGINE, typical gaming mechanics are inverted: the human becomes an NPC, while the Earth becomes the player. The typical hierarchy between player and environment is also dissolved: here, the landscape takes on an agency of its own, respawning itself daily.