The Guardian - Week in Art Newsletter, Fri 31 October, 2025 Jonathan Jones
ANNOUNCING: The Open Road — a journey reimagined through moving image
Launching in Autumn 2025, The Open Road reimagines the age-old tale of a journey taken, weaving together new stories by three contemporary artists; David Blandy, Amaal Said, and Sam Williams. The programme has been co-commissioned by a unique partnership of visual arts organisations including Film and Video Umbrella, The Amelia Scott, Cement Fields, FLAMIN, Forma, and Three Rivers.
Loosely inspired by ‘The Canterbury Tales’, the works draw from a disparate cast of characters to recount competing stories in a patchwork of styles. The three artists use storytelling traditions to offer fresh perspectives on journeys—on foot, by sea and through time. The newly commissioned works reflect on migration and belonging, untold histories and non-human connections. A smashed mobile phone decries its extraction. A daughter walks with her mother, connecting with the earth and a distant land. An eel’s story of migration and transformation weaves through the lives and landscapes of the Kent wetlands.
The programme for The Open Road will extend across the London and Kent area in late 2025 and early 2026, encompassing a series of solo presentations, community engagement initiatives, and curated screenings. More information on the commissioned works and full programme coming soon!
The Open Road begins in September 2025 with Commons by David Blandy at The Amelia Scott in Tunbridge Wells, continuing with Amaal Said’s Open Country at Red House in October 2025, and then on to The Eel’s Tale by Sam Williams with screenings in North Kent in October 2025 and as a part of Canterbury Festival in November 2025. The works will be screened together at FormaHQ on the evening of Thursday 13th November 2025. More screenings and events will take place between September and December 2025 and early 2026, hosting the works throughout Bexley, and FormaHQ, London.
Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Graphic Design: Plan B Creative Studio
ArtReview March Issue 2025: Preview of Weird Hope Engines, Bonnington Gallery, Nottingham
Serpentine and Nowadays present David Blandy’s Alien Pastoral: The Strain at COP16 as part of Plant Lab: MOTH (More Than Human Rights) in Cali, Colombia
Plant Lab: MOTH (More Than Human Rights) is a participatory design session that brings together people, plants, and the planet to imagine a greener future. This plant-led lab will include playing David Blandy’s new role-playing tabletop game Alien Pastoral: The Strain, first presented at Serpentine as part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon.
Participants will receive tools for including nature in their boardrooms, delegations, and policymaking spaces. Supported by interactive works, this part-workshop, part-community round table will look at alternative models for how to centre the rights of nature and build a better world.
In partnership with the Serpentine and Nowadays. With thanks to Kalpana Arisas, founder of Nowadays & Symbi0cene , & Serpentine Curators: Lucia Pietroiusti & Daisy Gould
Image: Alien Pastoral: The Strain, David Blandy, 2024; Commissioned by Serpentine Gallery for Infinite Ecologies Marathon
𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗡𝗧 𝗟𝗔𝗕: 𝗠𝗢𝗧𝗛 (𝗠𝗢𝗥𝗘 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗡 𝗛𝗨𝗠𝗔𝗡 𝗥𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧𝗦)
25 OCT
11:30- 1:00 PM
Location: Fundación Casa de Mono: Cra. 25 # 5-112, 3 de Julio, Cali, Valle del Cauca Cali, Colombia
𝗪𝗛𝗔𝗧’𝗦 𝗢𝗡
This plant lab is a participatory design session with people, plants, and planet.
𝗙𝗘𝗔𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗚𝗔𝗠𝗘𝗦, 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗞𝗦, 𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗠𝗢𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗧𝗥𝗔𝗡𝗚𝗘 𝗧𝗛𝗜𝗡𝗚𝗦 𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗠:
▪️Alien Pastoral: The Strain @david_blandy_
▪️Maize Metabolics from WORKOVERTIME by Jamie Allen & Louise Carver
▪️A Tale of Two Seeds from Semantica studios @atractorestudio @wildalchemylab
▪️Glitch @nowadayonearth
Register now for free via www.tinyurl.com/ourvillageculture!
Trēow of Time, by Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2023 has been shortlisted for The 2024 PSSA Marsh Award for excellence in public sculpture.
Photo credit:
Trēow of Time, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2023
A UCL East Public Art Commission
UCL East Marshgate Campus
Photo credits: Richard Stonehouse
Mubi Notebook
Cutscenes | The Game of Philosophy: Larry Achiampong and David Blandy on “Genetic Automata” by Matt Turner
Museum of Truth & Lies Podcast by Yasmin Khan
Read and share the Muse-Zine to support the WISDOM manifesto for truth-telling in museums.
Haunted Library Episode One: Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
Linktr.ee signposts audiences to all the key podcast platforms including Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, and more.
For ArtReview’s latest artist project, David Blandy and Jamie Sutcliffe have developed a solo journaling game called ‘Weird Hope Engines, or; A Choking Dust… Red, Clotted and Awful’.
To set the scene, the game takes place at the end of the twenty-first century. In this time, science fiction has lost all ethics, the Earth’s ecosystem has collapsed, along with it all systems of government, but you have the chance to start life anew on a nearby planet. You board a ship and are tasked with ‘establishing new ways of being’.
Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. His work explores artistic encounters with science fictive fabulation, the politics of gaming, animation and its multiple entanglements with developments in the life sciences, haunted media, the digital uncanny, and the persistence of myth, all understood as technologies of selfhood.
He is the editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, published by The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, and his essays, reviews, and interviews have been featured in Art Monthly, Frieze, The White Review, Rhizome, Art Review, The Quietus, Art Agenda, Bricks From The Kiln, and IsThisIt, amongst others.
@intron_depot
Areas Of Effect: Planar Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries
A one-day symposium on Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs) with live game sessions at ayrebyte
Saturday 9 March 2024, 11am - 8:30pm
Artist David Blandy & writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press, Jamie Sutcliffe have co-curated ‘Areas Of Effect: Planar Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries’, a day-long event that includes presentations, tabletop game-play sessions and talks.
Artwork from Eco Mofo’s!! by David Blandy & Daniel Locke, image: Daniel Locke
Speakers at the event include acclaimed RPG designers Emmy Allan, Kayla Dice, Mike Mason, Chris McDowall, Samuel Mui, and Zedeck Siew, alongside writers, historians and theorists such as Stu Horvath, Timothy Linward, Mark Pilkington, and Simon O’Sullivan.
An exhibition of TTRPGs-inspired video games by artists Kitty Clark, Uma Breakdown, John Powell-Jones, Petra Szemán, and Holly White are hosted on computers and available to play for visitors throughout the whole event.
The day culminates in live TTRPG play sessions of the games Eco Mofos by artist David Blandy and SUPERZEROES by TTRPG game designer Samuel Mui, amongst others, inviting the audience to play with a deck of uniquely designed TTRPG playing cards.
The event features a selection of merchandise and publications from Strange Attractor Press and independent London-based bookshop Igloo Tree, Massachusetts-based MIT Press and zine supplier Antipode Zines. Games from Laurie O’Connel and Loot the Room will also be on sale.
Programme info here
Image credit: Damian Griffiths, courtesy the artist and Seventeen Gallery
The Couch / Future Artefacts FM
Hosted by artists Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple
Future Artefacts FM are producing a mini-series for Dutch organisation, Het Hem and their online space The Couch on Magic and Technology with a focus on artists that work with soundscapes.
What would you do at the end of the world? For the third part of our collaboration with The Couch, we are thrilled to share David Blandy’s work, The End of The World, a 13 minute audio piece, originating from a larger video installation made in 2017.
Revisiting this work, we explore the ends of multiple worlds; family illness, the foundations of a political system shattering and the end of a 17 year old magical gaming world, Asheron’s Call. When reflected in the present moment, we hear from Blandy about collective grief, and where places of solidarity, like that in Asheron’s call, can help us come to terms with the endings of multiple worlds.
*The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.
Launch event for Larry Achiampong & David Blandy’s first permanent sculpture commission, Trēow of Time, 2023, A UCL East Public Art Commission
Trēow of Time, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2023
A UCL East Public Art Commission
Opens Friday December 1st, 2023 / RSVP here
UCL East, Marshgate, 7 Sidings Street, Stratford, London, E20 2AE
5:30pm: Drinks reception at Marshgate cafe
6pm: Larry Achiampong & David Blandy will give a short talk in the Lecture theatre on Level One, followed by a Q&A
6:45 - 8:30pm: PV & reception at the main Atrium with refreshments
Please RSVP for the launch on Friday 1st December, please click here.
For their first permanent sculpture commission, Trēow of Time, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy engaged in conversations with UCL academics and responded to the landscape surrounding the new UCL East campus. They have created a hyper-real installation inspired by 3D video gaming and their time spent between the natural and virtual realms. The work was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it reflects on a time of collective re-discovery of nature as a source of healing and wellbeing, whilst simultaneously highlighting inequalities that exist in access to green spaces.
Ornamental Hermits Were 18th-Century England’s Must-Have Garden Accessory
Shoshi Parks for Smithsonian Magazine
David Blandy, As The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim, Grizedale Arts, UK
Selected reviews and press: Larry Achiampong & David Blandy’s exhibition, Genetic Automata at Wellcome, London
Art Forum
Art Review
Artnet
Frieze
Art Newspaper
Moving Image Art London
Evening Standard
Atomic Light is an Artforum Must See
Review of David Blandy - Atomic Light, John Hansard Gallery by David Trigg
Studio International
David Blandy’s new artist book, published by John Hansard Gallery for the exhibition Atomic Light, on until May 6 2023
Available through the gallery bookshop or order through Cornerhouse Publications here: £10
The book also includes a beautiful reminisence by curator and researcher, Annie Jael Kwan, writing about a steaming bowl of juk (rice porridge) and the script for Empire of the Swamp written by playwright and writer Joel Tan, where he imagines a conversation between a crocodile, a lost soldier and an ant; a fable of nature and the repercussions of colonialism.
Artist interview in ROSA, purchase the issue here
Worldbuilding Gaming & Art in the Digital Age
Fifteenth-Anniversary Exhibition on Gaming and Art
Julia Stoschek Collection
5 June 2022 – 10 December 2023, JSC Düsseldorf
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
With works by Peggy Ahwesh, Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, Ed Atkins, Meriem Benanni, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ian Cheng, Cao Fei, Basmah Felemban, Ed Fornieles, SarahFriend, Kim Heecheon, Institute of Queer Ecology, Rindon Johnson, Keiken, Lawrence Lek, Gabriel Massan, Lual Mayen, Sondra Perry, Jacolby Satterwhite, Frances Stark, Sturtevant, Theo Triantafyllidis, Suzanne Treister, Angela Washko, Lu Yang, among others.
Julia Stoschek Collection
Schanzenstraße 54, 40549 Düsseldorf, Germany
& Centre Pompidou Metz, France / June 2023 - January 2024
Catalogue released for “Divination from a Night Sky Partially Obscured by Clouds / The Role of Photography in the Post-Media Age” GHMP, Prague
24. 5. 2022 – 18. 9. 2022
Saturday Morning Animation Club
Androids Dream / David Blandy / Sat June 25th / 10am
Online event
Sat, 25 June 2022 / 10:00 – 11:00 AM
Book Tickets here for a screening of ‘Androids Dream’ by David Blandy, followed by an artist's walk through and Q&A with the audience.
In Androids Dream (2022), Blandy deconstructs the cyberpunk aesthetic first prototyped by Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and which has continued to be repeated and become ever more ossified. Formed of multiple simulacra, the work involves Unreal Engine assets, uses Kojima’s Snatcher - itself a replay of Blade Runner in videogame form - and even deploys an algorithmic mimesis of the artist's own voice. Breaking down the aesthetic form, the film in turn breaks down, repeats, refracts, and goes into reverse.
Commissioned by Petra Szemán for On Animatics for Saturday Morning Animation Club
Saturday Morning Animation Club is produced in collaboration with with isthisit? and Off Site Project
Saturday Morning Animation Club is a series of screenings + talks across five weeks between 11 June - 9 July, showcasing films by people who wield the dual powers of being an artist and a nerd.
Unified by an early fascination and involvement with anime and games, each artist focuses in on the worlds and perspectives fandom allows for. From this angle the five videos broaden ideas of human and non-human perception, screen-based experiences, virtual worlds and alternative ways of being.
Tied together by a refusal to downplay the enthusiasms and generative energy of fandom, Saturday Morning Animation Club will lead viewers through iterations of animatic worlds, on- and off-screen, with or without player input.
