post # 28: the current buildstone imagination
i guess first, before speaking more on that, a note on what i'm talking about. buildstone as a field essentially emerged this past year for to refer to Minecraft redstone contraptions which seek to engineer aesthetics of motion rather than the function of utility. for people not knowing, redstone is a medium/mode embedded in the Minecraft game engine which functions somewhat like a mix of engineering and coding. essentially, redstone is a way for players to build machines within their Minecraft world to perform tasks. historically, these have congregated towards the tasks of: transportation (opening doors, elevators, railways, etc.) and automation (farms, item sorting, communication, etc.) but have also been used for more aesthetic things such as games etc. the advent of buildstone is an intervention in these historical practices which seeks to appropriate the machines of redstone to enhance the aesthetic pursuits usually confined to building. this is at once an intervention in redstone and an intervention in building practices, where there has historically been a deficit in Minecraft's ability to render motion. given the player-centered-ness of the game, many of the default ways of engaging with the game to build things construct a world where nothing exists except the player. unlike the real world, where people go to work every day and animals and bacteria and other things are buzzing around us playing this constant role and embedding motion and interchange of flows and forces in the very nature of reality, Minecraft ontology has historically adhered to the player so as to prioritize the construction of a tree-falls-in-a-forest-no-one-hears-a-sound model of relation & engagement with the world. it can be interesting in observing this, the types of images people congregate to constructing with these inherent limitations. while in no way singular, things that jump to mind for me are the propensity for post-apocalyptic/abandoned city imagery and other such images of ruins or post-ness. despite this base lack, players have for a long time expressed desire to have access to producing or viewing motion in their worlds outside of what their character actively produces. this has splintered out into several subfields such as adventure maps and this sort of thing, where motion is created via non-player characters, narrative, and closer-to-back-end--level interventions of commands, resource packs, and data packs (before it became the Bedwars & MMORPG <"skyblock"> server it is known for being today, Hypixel -- the person and the server -- used to put out quite a few of these; the first example coming to mind is Herobrine's Mansion).
well, so anyways, buildstone has emerged as a purportedly radical reimagining of these limitation and an attempt to bridge practices which have historically been rather cordoned off (building and redstone). the developments of buildstone had been bubbling underneath for a while and had existed latently in many forms before this name emerged to term them (dating back well before 2025 -- an example coming to mind is Etho's sandy city project or his Hermitcraft season 7 base, both of which used the non-player characters of llamas to simulate movement in their atmospheres**), but the catalyst that really set things into motion was Mumbo Jumbo's adoption of the term and subsequent prolonged exploration of what it may offer (1) (2) (3). This was a breakthrough not only because of Mumbo being one of the largest Minecraft SMP YouTubers (and playing on the largest/longest-running SMP) -- relevant insofar as that it reaches many viewers -- but also because of his proximity to people like Etho and Grian (other people playing on the Hermitcraft season 10 server). the distinction between viewers and these other youtubers i mean to draw is they are engaging with him and drawing inspiration from him at the first level through existing in the shared digital space where they can see and interact with for themselves the machines he produces and the aesthetics they make available. this compresence led to both parties going on to explore many iterations of what buildstone may afford their builds for the season (e.g.), with both Grian and Etho i think making waterfalls engaged in this aesthetic [in double checking this, i may have hallucinated the etho part...]. BDouble0100 also made a waterfall which i think leaned on buildstone [in double checking, it did not, i don't think], but it also simulated movement through minecraft's particle engine (campfires) so that's maybe a little different. (also worth noting that Etho was already engaging with a type of buildstone via his bonemeal farm at the start of the season prior to Mumbo;'s pivot into buildstone).
**shoutout etho.fyi for helping me track down these episode numbers
okay, anyways, so Mumbo discovers buildstone (not invents; he comes across people doing it underground on youtube) and makes it widely known and in addition to utilizing it in this survival multiplayer server, he also puts out several videos dedicated to exprloring and pushing the methods limits in creatrvie testing worlds < see (1) (2) (3) above> -- the main product of these was an exploration of fans an and gear aesthetics, which he integrated into his ongoing season long projects of building factory and computer images where buildstone made the spaces feel responsive and alive regardless of player input and whatever. this was a notable spark because it ran attention economy into the latent underground buildstone community on youtube, which thus introduced it 2 a bunch of people who became interested in exploring what practicing it could offer them. the people already doing it then started putting out more and more videos and a bunch of community projects and collaborations and discord servers et cetera began coalescing. (we can talk about other prehistories of buildstone such as the minecraft technical community (e.g., <1> <2>) and color theory youtbe minecraft youtube (e.g., <1> <2> <3> <4> <4> ***) and mapmakers and even just glass art -- something GoodTimesWithScar was big on playing around with on hermitcraft; of simulating the appearance of motion by sculpting 3d glass shapes (that are static but are geometrically complex as if the image of smoke or fire or such) which in the history of buildstone can be seen as an immediate precursor to mumbo exploring buildstone and wanting to imbue motion in his builds as he used this vitrine form for the smoke emanating from his factory's smokestacks -- also the prehistory of armor stand artistry, as often attributed to ZombieCleo as a pioneer (and likewise being another thing that mumbo picked up for the first time this season prior to his move into buildstone and which he later sought to integrate into the same aesthetic machinery [i can't track down the episode number right now, but i'm thinking at least about the machinery involved in doing armor stand swaps for Big Ron between different poses & such]).
***see: interview done by Minecraft color theory w/ @jakekeltoncrafts
okay, so there is this history, and like i said a lot of attentive motion is happening as a result of this spark of attention and spotlight paid and drawn to these ideas and small communities. showcases of what is happening get assembled by jakekeltoncrafts [who for sake of argumentative expediency i'm saying is metonym of buildstone community & developments; know it is external 2 him too, though] and this steady churn of people exploring and demonstrating new ways of simulating motion by actually moving items and blocks with redstone machinery in their worlds emerged and continued for a while. the latest of these is this big city project (see start of essay), which jake has said took 6 weeks to put together and is the result of a bunch of collaborative work in a multiplayer creative build server where many talented builders and redstoners came together to make a city with aesthetics of buildstone embedded into as many of the things as possible. highlights include driving cars driving autonomously & constantly on many of the city's roads, a beach with rising and falling tide, a giant ship with a simulated wake, and many fans and gears and light shows (lights can be another prehistorey -- light displayes being another field of redd\stone, where it starts with maybe calculators and then goes to other types of digital displays etc. [not linking that, just trust me]).
and so, before going further, i just want to stop for a moment to say, the stuff coming out of this buildstone city project is super cool and there's a lot to chew on. i am especially charged by the collaboration of it all. however, what i couldn't help but think about while watching the video showcasing the world download was... just how , automotive (as in automobile) it all was. buildstone as a field is marketed as, being about adding movement of redstone to builds, and it does this, yes, but with only a specific subset of type of builds. in the server, this buildstone city, there are a disproportionate amount of planes, trains, boats, and automobiles. part of this can be attributed to the fact that since buildstone was previously not a thing people did and since these modes of expression are things we often see as moving in the media we receive, this received image of movement as a fundamental quality of car would be harder to depict. people build and have built ships and cars and things but it is hard to capture their true ontology if you just produce an image of their static body/visage. now that it becomes possible, it makes sense that an outsized amount of people are doing it -- in this way we can think about this as the repressed breaking through and dominating the discourse.
at the same time, the types of things we don't see are also interesting. what is still not accessible, we can't quite know, but i'm aware of many things in the world which move which are not imaged in this city -- clouds being a big one. but anyways, the things that move are primarily human inventions. and primarily inventions which either are explicitly military/industrial or which other wise connote energy consumption and fuel use. yeah, there's an (i think) placid gesture of windfarms and renewable energy things like that imaged in the city as well (which is super interesting and i think im downplaying the significance of these images too much)-- which can at least be read as a cognizance of how energy hungry this type of image is (and the video says as much) (and enegy hungry not only in the diegesis -- what the video notes; but also in the literal sense insofar as it demands more comupter resources to run and thus requirtes more electricity to render; though it's like not that much more tbh). these are still a selective image. this is a type of imagination. this is telling of something about the minecraft player imaginary (the buildstoner imaginary) -- the type of player who is drawn to this artform. how much this will remain and how much it will be transcended we will see in time. it's also interesting that buildstone almost exclusively simulates pure routine. it imagines these perfect gifs that can loop endlessly. which is cool insofar as it's a gesture toward sustainability, but its also like pretending against the existence of natural intervention (of decay, of rot). this in some way can be an idealized form of the plane,train,automobile -- what if the car could drive endlessly on the road and never have to be repaired or piloted or refueled or anything like this -- what if things never broke down and we never had to confront death or anything else?
in other words, i think there's maybe a dangerous riptide. though the danger is not in what it can do but in the wake of the image (what the image had done in past lives). it can be reclaimed and rerouted, to be sure. but let us always be wary of an aestheticization of military men or worlds without people [idk nec about 2nd part of that]. there are many positives that are ripe for consideration, to be clear. i'm just having these voices always biting the back of my neck to think about what it may mean that we build images of shopping malls even in our fictions where we can simulate anything. oh, what if we could be shopping... what if we could be spending money...
to close, i want to reflect on another Minecraft video i saw yesterday -- that of a Minecraft arg /doc/ type thing by wifies going over i guess what seems to be a type of Yellow King adaptation in this strange genre/form of the Minecraft /horror/ ARG (other examples include <1> <2> <3> <4>). the video is cheesy in many ways, and my first instinct was to roll my eyes and go, this is a i'm 14 and this is deep moment, but i think if we sit with the text, there can be things to glean from it yet. if we pretend like it can make sense and we put the inherent silliness aside. in short, this is a text trying to sell the viewer about this classic Minecraft hoax of, you're living in an ontological world of single player Minecraft that is literally constructed around you, the player, where nothing-ish exists that you don't observe it so -- but what if the world was haunted and other people and things were there before and after you... the best known form of this is the imagination of Herobrine (the anti-Steve who is eternally repressed and reemerging and denied and existing in schizophrenic shadow at the ever edge of your vision in seemingly unfalsifiable terms). i'm wanting to mention some other forms, though, such as the Minecraft content farm slop novel -- which i read several of when i was a kid (Zoe Bee has a video talking about the exploitative production process involved in making these; which i was always cognizant of when reading and interacting with them as a kid and which made me deeply uncomfortable to see and to receive them as presents or something <imaging them as a kind of anti-image; a thing which is not meant to be> but which i nonetheless read many of and got fully into the fantasy and fiction and diegesis of it all and i think even got to spinning up AUs and OCs based on the received terms).
i trace this hoax history of a ghost in the machine to say, this too is a wanting to depict motion in an immobile world. with Minecraft ARG videos, you cannot depict motion because the game is formally semi-verboten in this way (hence why buildstone is a breakthrough), and so again the forms of narrative and hallucination are evoked to fill in the gaps. and this video about the yellow king was impressive in many ways -- several of the scenes are these huge huge chasms and empty chambers and other types of Lovecraftian expanses -- all imaged as empty or static or abandoned and motion is never seen in these places but in the occasional glimpse of evidence of had been motion. motion is in the edit, in the in between. it doesn't exist in the flesh in the way the mitochondria does. it isn't a powerhouse but a dream. and this lack of motion is like when tears have already run down your face moments before and now tears well up again and so it is they go following these latent traces of where things had been even though they could go anywhere, it is the statue in the marble preexisting that they tend towards. and again there's an imagination of a kind of loop still in this motion which doesn't exist and thus cannot have friction and thus can always be dreamed as being so much more. we can talk about horror and the power of the unseen. we can talk about Minecraft horror mods, where they are this difficult thing to manage and people are doing it in many ways and this too has been a resurgence this past year or two. we can talk about many things. but when we look at this ARG video which exists outside of buildstone's influence, what do we see and what don't we see? what type of architecture is this? what do these hallways connote? what can there be? what is the ghost? what does it look like? what did it look like in it's previous life? and how long until the haunted world spills over with so many undead, that they reemerge as the repressed to imbue vitality in ways hitherto unimagined and and and the world devolves all at once into Kurosawa Kiyoshi's 2001 film Pulse. and i'm thinking about how to turn a circle oustide in.