Air Divinations: Collective Enquiry

With artists Nick Murray, David Blandy, Jesse Jones & Forms of Circulation

When: 3 December 2024 / 9.45am-18:30pm

Where: University of Westminster and Northwick Park Hospital.

Price:Free to all! / Book here

The final of four “divinations” created to inform the creation of the Brent Biennial 2025. A one-day programme structured around air, featuring workshops and collective imagining.

Why Air?

A catalytic substance of ignition; breath symbolises life. Air/breath also represents the power of utterance; declaration, song, whistles, chants, spells, of mobilising ideas and knowledge, people and animals. An intangible, invisible force that creates frameworks such as culture, education, legal systems, religion and ideologies.

The four elements: the foundations of our collective enquiry

(Re)building requires the four elements. Earth, water, fire and air form the basis of many ancient philosophical systems; they are the essential ingredients in the alchemical processes of creation and transformation. Each element symbolises and energises a deeper understanding of different facets of existence. When combined, these essential elements have the potential to reconfigure our understanding of structures and knowledge, and help us to remake our world.

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA

[...], A film programme, curated by Astria Suparek 
Saturday, Nov. 30, 2024, 2–5 p.m 

Screening with work by David Blandy, Jesse Chun, Camille Henrot, Jonelle Twum, Suneil Sanzigiri & Lu Yang

Part of the 2024 Film Series introducing 52 films and time-based works by 48 directors and artists in the Carnegie Museum of Art Theater.

Carnegie Museum of Art
4400 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Esker Foundation, Canada
Friday, November 15th 2024 @, 7-10pm

Join us for an in-gallery tabletop rpg game night and play Gathering Storm: A Collaborative World-Building Game by UK artist David Blandy.

Register for this Program »

Gathering Storm is a collaborative world-building game that guides the players through adding elements to a map, imagining a postcolonial sci-fi world and then giving a set of characters to inhabit this space through a streamlined standard card-based system. Through a series of prompts, players come to terms with hidden histories and present injustices. No previous experience of tabletop gaming is necessary to play.

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

Critical Acts: Performance Lectures exploring how power operates in the digital age

9th of October between 6-9pm 
School of Digital Arts, Manchester
Reserve your free place

Our Critical Act artists are:

Nina Davies
Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment through observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed.

Michael-Jon Mizra
Michael-Jon Mizra (he/him) is a computer musician based in London, interested in how programmatic thinking, data-structure management, and algorithmic modelling can be used to compose and perform.

Petra Szemán + David Blandy
Petra Szemán (they/them) is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like landscapes. David Blandy (he/him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas as diverse as ecology, history and science to arenas of play.

Image Credit: The Deluge, James Ferraro at AND Festival 2017. Photo taken by Chris Foster

Critical Acts is an immersive gathering and a platform for surveying emerging net and digital cultures through performance lectures.

Seeds
Part of Serpentine Gallery - the Infinite Ecologies Marathon

Venue: The Magazine Serpentine North Gallery 28 September 2024
12-5pm Price: £20, £15 conc.

NB: Please arrive on site for 11.45am.

We have a limited number of free tickets available for anyone who cannot pay the ticket price, please email: information@serpentinegalleries.org for more information.

Book here

Artists: David Blandy, Exodus Crooks, Lucia Pizzani and Jumana Manna with Chef, Moonhyung Lee

Join us for Seeds, an extended lunchtime programme addressing worlding through the lens of ecology, part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon.

Continuing the legacy of The Magazine Sessions, Seeds delves into the multifaceted significance of seeds as vehicles for world building. Beyond their role in food production, seeds carry history, memory and serve as potent metaphors for growth, ideas and exchange.

This extended lunchtime series aims to create space to discuss the complex narratives embedded within seeds and their ecological and imaginative potential. Seeds invites participants to envision new commons and methods of knowledge exchange through the embodied experience of communal eating, sharing dishes created in close collaboration with the artists. We invite diners to engage with seeds as nourishment and a catalyst for critical dialogue.

Seeds will facilitate four artist-led activations at a communal table to explore the revolutionary potential of food in reshaping our relationships to our environments and each other. The participating artists, David Blandy, Exodus Crooks, Lucia Pizzani and Jumana Manna, were invited to work with chef Moonhyung Lee, Sous Chef at the world’s first zero-waste restaurant, Silo, to develop dishes to complement their contributions.

Image credit: Lucia Pizzani. Corn and Clay, Courtesy the artist.

Serpentine Gallery

Free Live Event

Alien Pastoral: The Strain - David Blandy
Part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon
Serpentine Gallery

Venue: The Magazine Serpentine North Gallery
27 September 2024, 2pm Free 

Join us for the first event of this weekend series exploring worlding and life cycles through the lens of ecology. Part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon.

You can apply to attend (free) by registering your interest here by Friday, 20 September at noon. Successful applicants will be notified by Tuesday, 24 September.

Experience how relationships and environments change in this open worlding game experience. 

Participants will experience and discuss the worlding potential of gaming while playing David Blandy’s new tabletop role-playing game, Alien Pastoral: The Strain.

Curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, Head of Ecologies, and Daisy Gould, Assistant Curator, Live Programmes. Produced by Isobel Peyton-Jones, Producer.  

Alien Pastoral: The Strain centres on a biological research station, run by an Authority, as the scientists try to engineer a new strain to solve an existential problem. An adaptation of Blandy’s previous work Gathering Storm, this game explores the strange and often blurred spaces between agriculture, technology and capitalism. Players will collaboratively design a research station complete with seedbeds, orchards and laboratories to experience how relationships change with their environments in this open worlding game experience.

You do not need any prior role-playing game experience to participate. The workshop is followed by a feedback session with the artist.

Alien Pastoral: The Strain is a participatory event which involves complex themes, narratives and storytelling; including material around body horror, isolation, loss of autonomy and trauma.

Serpentine Gallery

Areas Of Effect: Planar Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries
Symposium and live play sessions

Part of Arebyte 2023/24 programme The Body, The Mind, The Soul

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.

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

Aryebyte

Strange Attractor Press

Image: Artwork from Eco Mofo’s!! by David Blandy & Daniel Locke, Image: Daniel Locke

Gathering Storm: Collaborative world building workshop with David Blandy
Whitechapel Gallery, London
Sat 24 Feb, 12.30-3.30pm
Youth Programme: for participants aged 15-24

Book Here - Free

Join this half day workshop for young people exploring David Blandy’s collaborative world-building game, Gathering Storm, developed from his research around food, agriculture and colonial histories using voice, writing and drawing to imagine new worlds and societal systems collaboratively. Create a community together through collaborative map-making and story-telling.

Whitechapel Gallery

Gathering Storm, David Blandy, 2022. Developed as part of Delfina Foundation’s Politics of Food Season 5 in association with Gaia Art Foundation. 

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with Larry Achiampong and David Blandy

Saturday 10 February 2024, 13:30 – 17:00 / Free but please book tickets here
Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE

Join us for a free screening of ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ (2018, cert. PG).

Artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy will introduce the film, take you through an activity, and facilitate a discussion. We’ll be talking about science fiction and its relationship to the themes in our ‘Genetic Automata’ exhibition by Larry and David.

Free pizza, popcorn, pick ’n’ mix and soft drinks will be provided.

Doors open at 13:30. The film starts at 14:00.

Larry Achiampong & David Blandy in conversation with Black Cultural Archives’ Managing Director, Lisa Anderson

Friday, 2 February 2024, 18:30 20:00

Black Cultural Archives 1 Windrush Square London, SW2 1EF
Map

Discover the compelling narrative behind the film God_Mode with multi-disciplinary artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy in an exclusive in-conversation event hosted by Black Cultural Archives’ Managing Director, Lisa Anderson. Join us at BCA for an engaging exploration into the roots of deeply ingrained racial ideas in society and the pivotal role of science in shaping these perceptions. Doors open at 6:00 pm.

Live event with David Blandy: Gathering Storms: Origins
Monday 13 November / 6:30-8pm

Places are limited, please reserve a ticket by emailing ftw at forthewin.ch

As part of The Seashore of Endless Worlds, Art & jeux de société
Venue: Le Commun, Building J, 1st & 2nd floor, Rue des Vieux-Grenadiers 10, 1205 Geneva, Switzerland

Curated by FTW: Christian Bili & Samuel Wagen-Magnon

Exhibition dates: 1- 22 November 2023
Open Mon- Sun, 12 -6pm

Gathering Storm: Origins by David Blandy considers the international power dynamics that reach out from Geneva through microcosm, as players devise a single extra-terrestrial community that models different modes of power and control. Players create a community together through collaborative map-making and story-telling, as random prompts take them through a story that evolves towards a radical shift in control. The game facilitates a tale of resistance and making change, told through a culture based around one strange alien fruit. 

Several of the events described in the game are inspired by incidents in which Geneva-based corporations are involved. The writing and worlding takes on the language of Mary Shelley's Geneva-based Frankenstein.